Swallowing a Donkey's Eye by Paul Tremblay

these parts of the novel are told in very clear-eyed prose, which contrasts nicely with the carnivalesque and absurd farm-and-city chapters.īy the end, when we find ourselves under the pier, the carnival all but drops away, and we are confronted with humanity at its most desperate, and there is such amazingly wonderful pathos, and i couldn't help but feel sympathy for a character who until that point had been under a pretty harsh spotlight. and it shuttles the reader back-and-forth between this lunatic setting and the memories of our hero's life before-farm, and the circumstances that led to his choosing farm in the first place. i get it, i get the dehumanization and the moral deadening, i get the complacency and the lassitude of people under the strongarm of capitalist greed and genetic meddling, but it rarely transcends its own delight in its own perceived allegorical cleverness to become anything more than just a sad empty shell of a story.Īh, but this one goes a step further. This kind of satire of bureaucracy and commercialism usually bores my teats off.

'city' rests on top of a pier, under which all the homeless have been relocated and left for dead, and is a horrorshow of consumerism gone mad, whose inhabitants are aggressively accosted by people wearing television screens showing commercials, and live in fear of being sent under the pier.

we find ourselves in a future-dystopia, where our hero is living out a sort of contracted indentured servitude on 'farm,' a tourist-trap theme park where guides wear plush animal costumes and lead tour groups through faux-bucolic settings to gawp at people who have given up their freedom in exchange for a little money to send home, while they toil to produce food for 'city', and live animals have had their vocal cords removed, so that animal sounds must be pumped in to delight its visitors. this book is two stories stuck together, in a chimera that somehow works.īecause at first, i wasn't sure what i was going to think of it. It is not erotic, though, despite a golden-shower scene. I love that you people thought this was erotica. I loved this post so much, i had to use it to start my review. Trudi: haha! saw that title and my first thought was 'oh noes, she has officially reached rock bottom with the monster porn!' You have corrupted me. Oh, what, is that me and paul tremblay? it most certainly is!

Swallowing a Donkey's Eye by Paul Tremblay