Me and the Devil
A Novel
-
-
3.7 • 9 Ratings
-
-
- $7.99
Publisher Description
An aging New Yorker, a writer named Nick, feels life ebbing out of him. The world has gone to hell and Nick is so sick of it all that he can't even have a glass of champagne. Then one night he meets a tantalizing young woman who agrees to come back to his apartment. Their encounter is the most strangely extraordinary of his life. Propelled by uncontrollable, primordial desires, he enters a new and unimagined dimension of the forbidden and is filled with a sexual and spiritual ecstasy that is as intense as it is unholy.
Suddenly Nick's senses are alive. He feels strong, unconquerable, beyond all inhibition and earthly morality. He indulges in life's pleasures, pure and perverse, sublime and dangerous, from the delicate flavors of the perfect tomato to the fleshy beauty of a woman's thigh. But Nick's desire to sustain his rapture leads him to a madness and a darkness far greater and dreadful than have ever ridden the demon mares of night. Writing in a lineage that includes Dante, William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Hubert Selby, Jr., and Hunter S. Thompson, Nick Tosches may be America's last real literary outlaw -- a fearless, uncensorable seeker of our deepest secret truths and desires, from the basest to the most beautiful.
Me and the Devil is outrageous, disturbing, and brilliant, a raw and blazing novel truly unlike any other. Like the man said: Read him at your peril.
"A raw and blazing novel by "the single, most brain-searingly dangerous man of letters. Read him at your peril." -- Anthony Bourdain
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this novel of sadomasochistic vampirism, an aging writer drinks blood to restore youth, vitality, and the urge to write. Nick is a misanthrope who sees people as "a source of tedium and acid reflux." With young women, he enjoys rough sex, the kind that draws blood (his pickups like to be raped, bitten, and whipped). But there are no black capes or bats; instead, drinking blood is the transgressive act of an intellectual, an incarnadine feast over dull conversations about, among other things, the efficiency of the Greek language or the precision of Latin when it comes to oral sex. Nick also converses with the devil, about haberdashery and The Music Man. Occasionally, Tosches (In the Hand of Dante) uses the narrator as a mouthpiece to decry the "monopoly of bookstores" (a subject he's covered before), "island-nigger nannies... pushing white yuppie brats in three-grand prams and strollers," and other topics. The book is composed of turgid prose, pornographic sex, misogyny, and slurs, images, and scenes impartial in their offensiveness, such as a woman falling in love with her rapist. A novel for the most devoted fans of "transgressive" fiction and the most outr vampire erotica.
Customer Reviews
Me and the Devil
I first learned of this book in Esquire magazine, and it sounded very different, and that was an understatement .
This by far the strangest book I've ever read, in a Great way!
It was like reading poetry in Novel form. I felt in many cases
a feeling of similarity to the main character. It is definitely a must read. It's not for everyone, but I guess that's the point