What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?

[Rev. Rye]

Today I found out that Morrissey has published a very shitty novella called List of the Lost that's basically American Psycho with zero self-awareness and not even the extreme violence that sucks people into that book.

The plot basically involves four teens who kill a homeless guy with a single punch. In theory, this leads to a curse on their half-mile relay team (an event that apparently does not exist in reality). In practice, the plot barely exists and only as a break from Morrissey's ranting.

Some highlights:

• Moz wrote a blurb that's formatted as a review, and it still reads like he's quote mining from a negative review that he thinks he can make positive.
  
• EVERYBODY speaks with the same convoluted prose that Morrissey uses. Compounding this error is that he decides to make it take place in Boston, the American city with the most distinctive accents of any American city. I understand that not every Bostonite sounds like Jimmy Fallon's Boston Teen, but somehow, I get the feeling that a Boston where everyone talks like Morrissey is very unlikely.
  
• This wouldn't quite be as bad if Moz' prose style involves lots of sentences like
  

  With just over a month to go before the competition where middle- and long-distance events shape lives forever, our foursome pack life’s inessential essentials in migration for a holistic fortnight at a sportsman’s haven known as Natura,  a no-nonsense collegiate retreat where countryside affiliations commune in one heady scholastic clash, where a single-track road led the hidden pavilion of an abandoned plantation shadowed by giant dawn redwoods five meters in girth; where deadly dale led to stumpery woods and slippery stepping stones criss-crossed over dangerously racing rapid rivers.

  Or insults like "You should be forced to live face down in your own feces, as you probably do anyway, if only for general identification purposes" or a description of a sleepy suburb as "the lush houses of beddy-bye shut-eye snoozled in sleepland."
• A bizarrely misogynistic attitude which is made all the more puzzling when, during the middle of a dissertation on Bonanza (yes, really), he lets slip that he believes that people only inherit genes from their mothers.
  
• He sets the novel in 1975, but bizarrely, devotes a rant to Margaret Thatcher. If this was set a decade later (especially if it took place in Britain), this would at least make sense. But this is 1975 and they're Boston teenagers. I strongly suspect that, at this point, the only possible way they would have known about her is if they watched Monty Python reruns on PBS and heard a passing reference to her (even though Reginald Maulding was mentioned even more and Thatcher is given three references total in the entire series if the scripts I found online are any indication and the most substantive insight the series brings about her is that her brain is in her knee), and I suspect that even among most Brits at the time, she'd most be famous as the milksnatcher, although given Morrissey's views on animal products, I can't imagine that even that would set him off.
  
• A sex scene that's part ridiculous one-liners and part descriptions of the physical act of love that recall a dog shitting on a rug. 
  

More info hyeah.

And the funny thing: his autobiography was actually readable, so he has zero excuse for making something like this.