Whilst rumours abound that he may be retiring from touring, Morrissey is finally actualising his aspirations in the field of literary fiction. His debut novel, List of the Lost, hit bookstore shelves earlier this month.
Following on from his acclaimed autobiography, List of the Lost is Moz’s first attempt at fiction. The plot revolves around a 1970s relay running team, who accidentally become ensnared in a wicked demon’s curse.
“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,” writes Moz on his fan forum.
“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.”
Early reviews have been less than kind to the former Smiths frontman. As FACT reports, the Guardian’s Michael Hann called the book “an unpolished turd”, which is probably worse than a polished turd, though it’s really hard to say.
But it’s one passage in particular that is being cited as the highlight (or lowlight, depending on how you look at it) of what could go down as one of the worst books to be released in 2015. Turns out, Morrissey sucks at writing about S-E-X:
“Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled 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 smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.”
Not only was that an inordinately long sentence, we’re now praying we never have to read the words “bulbous salutation” again.
Oh God, we just read it then and now we can’t get it out of our heads. Is it just us, or was that the most unsexy sex scene that ever sexed?
For our money, though, we can’t go past this incredible piece of dialogue: “I suffer greatly in painful silence and I speak to you, now, with servitude whilst also pleading for your understanding. I am alone and I agonize in an exasperated state.”
This would be a fine if it were in a fantasy novel set in some Medieval wonderland, but as Hann notes, “That, one strongly suspects, was not a common pattern of speech in Boston in 1975.”
