Less than a year after publishing his autobiography, Moz is at it again with his first foray into fiction.
Yesterday on his official fansite, “True to You,” Morrissey posted a synopsis of the novel, entitled List of the Lost:
“The theme is demonology … the left-handed path of black magic. It is about a sports relay team in 1970s America who accidentally kill a wretch who, in esoteric language, might be known as a Fetch … a discarnate entity in physical form. He appears, though, as an omen of the immediate deaths of each member of the relay team. He is a life force of a devil incarnate, yet in his astral shell he is one phase removed from life. The wretch begins a banishing ritual of the four main characters, and therefore his own death at the beginning of the book is illusory.”
But perhaps that’s just a sensationalized description that doesn’t do justice to his otherwise glorious prose? According to The Guardian’s Michael Hann, it’s not; he pans the “unpolished turd of a book” while breaking down how Morrissey uses the fiction form as a veil for his various platitudes that were seemingly all laid out in his autobiography. Over at The Telegraph, Michael Deacon has compiled a list of the most embarrassing quotes from the novel, including a very purple sex-scene:
“At this, Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and puled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.”
If you’re inclined, List of the Lost is now available via Penguin Books (UK).
(h/t to Consequences of Sound )