Description:
Distorture is a very unusual, elegantly designed (and illustrated) collection of short stories and a few poetic essays--densely embroidered with expressions like "a sandpainting of empty bodies and fixed lamprey eyes," and "the stained remains lay plainly disembrained." Rob Hardin is dark, challenging, cruel, and often hilarious. He alludes to Charles Baudelaire, David Koresh, Jacques Lacan, Joel-Peter Witkin, Minnie Mouse. He gives us "Twenty-Five Reasons for Liking Horror." He is a musician as well as writer, and he surgically splices what he calls "linear dissonant counterpoint" right into the reader's brain. Poppy Z. Brite found Distorture so disturbing, she couldn't finish it. For me, Hardin's word-magic induces a gorgeous, razor-edged nightmare from which I wish never to awake. I think Jim Goad, author of The Redneck Manifesto, sums it up best: "There is a brief moment in which the abused shakes off his chrysalis and turns into the abuser. This book freezes that moment and runs it through a series of rigorous forensic tests."
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