I love that Burgess can show you the inside of a broken brain in a believable, instinctively understandable way. Of course this meant I spent half the book wondering if the act of understanding the book equated with being a sociopath myself. So that was.... creepy.But while Cashtown has the intelligence of Pontypool and Idaho Winter, for me it just doesn't have the beauty or the heart. I raced through this book in a day without highlighting anything, re-reading anything or gasping out loud. Mayb...

I'm not a big horror fan, but this one was superbly written. Couldn't put it down. Or sleep. Now I get the willies every time I pass through Cashtown Corners.

Told in a chilling first person POV, this book grabs you right away and puts you in the head of a man whose mind has snapped.His actions thereafter left an indelible mark on my mind. The random cruelty and unconscionable acts so easily performed on citizens of his small town, people he knew and those just passing through gives us pause to understand why this is happening. Told in graphic detail from one evil act to another, our POV character questions his own actions even while carrying out each...

Probably a closer look into the mind of madness than I ever actually wanted to have.WARNING: Do not read while eating.

One of the things I like to while I sit in my booth is pretend it's September 11. How awesome is that? Anyone can do it and it's like you have the greatest time for free. Your imagination can do whatever it wants to, of course, that's how we get things like sex with alligators and people who make baby bridges across rivers of lava. But every once in a while the imagination gets to step over its borders and be something. That happened on September 11. Karen wrote a good review for this book and i...

Sometimes this Tony Burgess guy takes flight and swoops exulting into a fiery firmament of linguistic legerdemain, really lovely brilliant stuff, I love it – he did it in Ravenna Gets and he does it here – example –A torn cloud grows sideways along the moon’s eye. A fine oil is scattered out from the white crawlspace of a half galaxy. The oil is orange and green and gold that sprays behind the moon and emerges towards the unseen sun as a brief map. Black scratched lines that hold for a second th...

Tony Burgess is an author I feel I should like, but can’t really get into. Having read ‘Pontypool Changes Everything’ some years back, which I found to be a wildly antagonistic experience, I can at least say that I enjoyed this a bit more. There was enough going for me to stay til the end and try to piece it together, but Burgess’s prose and hallucinatory storytelling keeps this from being a full-on recommendation. It just feels like too much going on with too little a reason. Definitely a cool

Brief, gruesome and savage. I don't know what I expected but this was not it. This book is wild. First-person narration of a sudden and shocking killing spree and the aftermath. To say more would be to spoil it.Cashtown Corners is a real place matches the description in the book (but the gas station has been rebuilt and there is a Pizza Pizza in it now). One of those places where you wonder why it has a name at all.I actually found myself holding my breath a couple times while reading this becau...

Okay. What? But it was good. Even though I often despise stream-of-consciousness but it somehow works here. It does. You might not always be certain as to what's really going on but Burgess makes it work. This is probably the closest thing to a cover buy for me, besides getting most of my book from the library, when I do buy books I don't fall for pretty covers. I might get interested and look at the synopsis but I choose them for the content. This one though is very vague on its description: th...

"Well, ma'am, looks like the problem is people. They just make us nervous and then we kill them. And then we feel better until someone makes us nervous again. And well, ma'am, that's the way it lays."It's true, Bob Clark DOES NOT have a way with people. He doesn't like talking to them and he damn sure doesn't like seeing them.I don't like faces on people in town so I scribble over them. I don't actually recall what Feck looks like in the face. Just swirls and loops out of a ballpoint. Round and

so, i love this book, but writing the review for it is pissing me off a little bit. as a procrastination tactic, because i really didn't feel like burrowing back into my paper just yet, i thought, "i shall write a very informed review for once; one which edifies its readers and is full of facts and figures and well-constructed sentences and no cursewords or animal pictures."seriously, that isn't going to fucking happen.because i may be being fooled. i don't keep up on true crime stories from can...

Bloody weird first person narrative of a mentally broken spree killer that doesn't try to explain, excuse or justify itself in any way."Well, ma'am, looks like the problem is people. They just make us nervous and then we kill them. And then we feel better until someone makes us nervous again. And well, ma'am, that's the way it lays."It's disturbing and far more interesting than similar more popular titles such as the one by Bret Easton Ellis that Australian bookshops are still required to sell s...

Disturbing, but in the right kind of ways. Wonderful, evocative language that is inventive (without drawing too much attention to itself) while effortlessly carrying forward the narrative. Made me believe I was in the mind of a mass murderer.

I hadn't been aware of Tony Burgess until about three months ago. I was flipping through channels and found -- on IFC I think, but maybe it was FearNet -- a zombie movie I'd never seen or heard of before, and it was only 10 minutes in. It had the unlikely title, "Pontypool," which suggested correctly that it was a low-budget indy -- one set, enough awkwardly paced dialogue to suggest that second takes were a rare luxury -- but didn't imply anything to do with zombies. A zombie movie without the

Holy hell. I haven't read a book that made me this uncomfortable since American Psycho. Short, sweet, and bloody disturbing. Hats off, Mr Burgess. Hats off.

I read this book in a single day - which is quite rare for me.Burgess take the reader squarely into the head of the psychotic protagonist, and the novel itself reads almost like a stream-of-consciousness rant. The perspective shifts with the character's mental state - at times almost incoherent, and other times deceptively rational and aware that he *should* feel certain emotions (even when he is killing people), but does not.This novel has far less gore than similar works I have read - somethin...

This was such an eerie read.. mostly because it felt so real. Truly seemed as though it could be the real ramblings of a killer. The photos in the book only worked to make it even more "true-crime" esque. Also - some of the descriptors and lines really stick with you, particularly for me when Bob is describing the smell of death.

This is number 3 of 42 signed numbered copies.

Well, that was nuts! Told from a first-person perspective, a gas-pump attendant tries his hand at murder and home invasion over an unhinged but contemplative couple of days. The third act in particular is great, where an unreliable narrator infects some townspeople with that very same affliction and things take a weirdly sympathetic turn. A fascinating sometimes frustrating book that's deep in this dude's brain, riddled with curious 9/11 obsessions, and (bonus!) featuring a very clever extra add...

I bought this book a while back and had forgotten what the premise was. So, when I finally got around to reading it, I plucked it off the shelf thinking it was southern fiction. Maybe with kids or rural folks. A character study. I read the synopsis on the back and realized it wasn't what I'd thought. It's by the same author who wrote the novel the movie Pontypool is based on. I'd seen the movie and thought it was pretty good. Okay well, let's go. The writing wasn't what I'd expected either. Ther...