JERKY'S BOOKSHELF: THE PARADISE MOTEL, BY ERIC McCORMACK

Eric McCormack's The Paradise Motel.

"Postmodern" is a word that gets tossed around like... well, like stuff that gets tossed around a lot! See? Even that little "joke" of mine could be considered postmodern, or PoMo as its most fervent and hip adherents tend to call it. Filled with the kind of gruesome grotesques that literary critic and philosopher Julia Kristeva termed "the carnivalesque", Canadian author Eric McCormack's four-part
parade of nightmare imagery is episodic and disjointed.

And yet, there still remains a compelling and occasionally thrilling multi-layered narrative involving one man's quest to find out whether or not his grandfather's tall tales about the gruesome fate of the MacKenzie family, with whom old granddad had grown up back in rural Scotland, are true.

If you like your fiction steeped in violent, gruesome physicality, with a surrealistic twang that occasionally reminded this reader of Yann Martel's Life of Pi by way of the Russians (I'm warning you... it's grim!), then perhaps you might want to give The Paradise Motel a try. Don't let the non sequitur title throw you. This isn't a John Irving pastiche.

As with every book appearing on JERKY'S BOOKSHELF, if you decide to purchase it via Amazon, please go through MY LINKS. The few extra pennies a month this nets me goes a long way towards compelling me to continue producing this blog.