Eat your heart out, Salman Rushdie. This is how to write.
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Tired of the self-conscious literary form? Of the sainted Salman Rushdie disguising a lack of imagination - and skill - behind oh! so clever word games? Of Sebastian Faulkes producing yet another script for a B Movie? Tired, in fact, of the whole middle-class angst literary genre?
Read Minions. It isn't a genre 'gay' book. It is brilliantly written and with a searing honesty you can taste. This is why American writers dominate the English language market: overall they're better.
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Beautiful, horrible, magnificent
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I couldn't put this book down. Bowes is one of the best writers I've encountered in years. He gives us a tour, vividly evoked, of some of the more hideous realities of our time, but solidly in there with the horrors are courage, compassion and redemption. Bowes is a writer's writer. His evocation of a miserable Boston childhood and a horrific coming-of-age in Hell's Kitchen couldn't be more truthful, and nevertheless exhilarate. Through this world angels also walk, and strange illuminations. His hero survives, endures, and keeps the faith against tremendous odds. You won't find sleek and phony gothic figures in Minions of the Moon; there isn't a lie or a word of self-indulgence or hackwork in it. You will find demons in plenty, acute human pain, joy and hope. This book is good for the soul.
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A complex and complicated tale of a depraved ,dark life.
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Maybe one doesn't need to know how it feels to be a fifteen year old hustler selling his body at the Y, or walking through a rotten tenement to score some heroin from some animal that might just as well kill as deal. This author knows and communicates the disorienting merry-go -round of addiction, the intense highs as well as the loss of perspective as experienced by the protagonist, (and through superior storytelling,experienced by the reader.)The story takes some work to get through as it really is a tapestry or mosaic of vignettes,some in the present or near past and some only in dreams of the past.Does he really have a double? Or is the wraith-like figure merely an allegory for the evil he has done? The darkness of the story is gut wrenching as is his search for humility, charity and peace. Like a gritty film noir Alice in Wonderland, the story takes the reader to a place he longs to escape from,while hoping for the redemption of the hero and his eventual escape as well.
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A Fine And Brave Book
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This is one of the most remarkable books I've seen in a long time. Remarkable not just in the quality of the writing - which is extraordinarily fine, but no surprise to anyone who has already read the author's short fiction in the SF and fantasy magazines - but in the tremendous courage that must have been required to write it at all. It is obvious that this story is based on personal experience of the most painful sort - the kind that most of us would want to forget and hope no one else ever found out. Yet Bowes has had the guts to bring it all up and show it to us, so that he can share with us the things he has learned from his experiences; and perhaps help us learn too. Not that this is a didactic or boring book; on the contrary, the story is an exciting and fascinating one, an exploration of the Doppelganger concept, rarely seen in fantastic fiction because it is so hard to handle well. But besides entertaining us, Richard Bowes is trying to tell us some things, about the split nature in all of us and about how we have to come to terms with our darker selves. This is, in fact, one of those books that can be read at many different levels - as a straightforward supernatural thriller, as a psychological exploration of the human identity, as a symbolic treatment of schizophrenia and addiction, and many other things. It will repay re-reading; you will find things you didn't notice the first time around. Homophobes may be offended by the frank and unapologetic treatment of the narrator's sexual development; some gays, on the other hand, may not like the de-glamorized descriptions of such things as child prostitution. But this is above all an HONEST book; a demonstration that, as Hemingway pointed out, the story that is made up can be truer than any mere narration of facts. Richard Bowes is a fine writer and a brave man. I salute him.
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A (Con?)Fusion of Genres
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Embedded in _Minions of the Moon_ is a suberb ghost story, but around that fun, spooky story swirls a lot of rather disjointed narrative about addiction. The coolest part of this book was the whole doppelganger motif: Kevin has a double and it is not a mere figment of his imagination. Like his mother before him, he has a doppelganger that often carries on a life apart from him. At first the eerie poem incantations from his old Irish aunt is his only apotropiac. Later in the book some mysterious characters called "sojourners" appear that never quite get explained, but are spookier for their vagueness. The best part of this idea was that it was only together that Kevin and the double form a "whole human being." The narrative then sets off in the direction of their union (one thinks). If this were all the story, I would have liked it much better. But to this, the author tries to add less supernatural dimensions to the doppelganger theme with a alcohol and drug addiction subplot. And, admittedly, a writer would have to delve far and deeply into the psychology of addiction to write anything eye-popping on that topic after David Foster Wallace's phenomenal _Infinite Jest_. But Mr. Bowes is a good writer. I just thought there were two or three distinct books here, much more disjointed than Kevin person and Fred the doppelganger.
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