The Book of Fuck

Written in real time over seven days THE BOOK OF FUCK is a short, sharp pun-addled pulp fiction pastiche where the absurd underworld of music – and reality itself – is exaggerated to new dimensions.
 
Following the frantic movements of a rock fan on the trail of America’s public enemy number one, THE BOOK OF FUCK is a buckled break-neck rant let loose at punk rock speed. Literature comes none more black.
 
“With a title like that, you’ve got to write a good book or have the word “wanker” silently appended to your name forever after. Just to make things more difficult, the press release trumpets the fact that The Book Of Fuck was written in seven days. I don’t know about your criteria for choosing a book to read, but something written in seven days sounds to me like it will be a cramp-stomached vomit of speed-crazed gibberish, especially if the back cover states it’s “a buckled break-neck rant let loose at punk rock speed”.
 
Thankfully, none of these things are true. The Book Of Fuck is a homage and a pisstake of the twilight world of music journalism, a first person reportage of a starving hack sent off in search of a death metal antichrist superstar called, to the joy of America’s Christian masses, the God Of Fuck. GoF is like Marilyn Manson, Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop and GG Allin all rolled into one – the bogeyman of popular culture. But GoF doesn’t get much of a look-in even though the search for him propels the plot – the pages are taken up with the internal monologue of our protagonist, a mix of furious punning, musical musing and starving artist clichés twisted into new shapes, all set against his love of London’s squalid glamour. It’s a prose style that can certainly be called punk rock, but the tone of our hero is far more gentle and even genteel than even the most half-hearted sneer from Mr Rotten. He’s a Cat Stevens’ fan, for Christ’s sake.
 
Published by Wrecking Ball Press (2004)