Order I WILL ROT WITHOUT YOU here
In all my nights, in all my sleep, I've never dreamt I was flying. Not even once.
Meeting Josie was the second Great transformative experience of my existence and undoubtedly the most significant *. Having someone in your life doesn't just fill you with hearts and butterflies, it also does wonders for your cognitive development as a person. It freaks me out just to think what would happen to me if she walked out the door tomorrow morning and never came back. I thought for the longest time that no words could express the dread I felt at being the idea of being alone again, but Danger Slater's new novel I Will Rot Without You draws a gut-wrenching and eerily efficient portrait of what it would be like. It is gorgeous and utterly terrifying novel.
Ernie Cotard has been falling apart since getting dumped by his girlfriend Gretchen. Cockroaches have invaded his apartment, mold is growing on the walls of his bathroom and his neighbor is taking over his own girlfriend's body by amputating parts of his to sew on her's. Ernie is in survival mode, trying to find reasons to hold on, so he decides to take charge of his apartment's cleanup. But what if it was all by design though? The mold and the cockroaches. What if the universe was trying to tell him something? There is much more at stake for poor Ernie than his puny broken heart.
I Will Rot Without You is a half a surrealist allegory and half a contemporary novel about heartbreak. It is separated in titled chapters that read like portraits or standalone sketches if you will, which helps framing the intricate and luxuriant style of Danger Slater for a first time reader (such as me). Slater knows a thing or two about loneliness, so I Will Rot Without You is written in first person POV and goes for long segments without dialogue. There is a lot that happens inside Ernie's head and little interaction, so it could become extremely difficult to follow if it wasn't so rigorously framed in these enjoyable sketch-like chapters.
She thumbs through her mail. Let's out a little sigh. "Always the same old crap, right?" she says, shuffling from letter to letter. "Bill. Bill. Advertisement. Credit card application. Advertisement. What's this one? A postcard from my dentist reminding me to come in for a yearly checkup? Are you kidding me?"
"At least he cares," I say.
I know what you're thinking. No, I Will Rot Without You is not one of these novels where a male protagonist spends two hundred pages moping over his cold-hearted ex and wallowing in his own sadness. Ernie has a cockroach and mold problem to deal with, which of course an allegory, but it allows him to put his relationship to Gretchen in perspective and whenever she comes back into his thoughts, it's to illustrate how Ernie's life changed since she's gone and it is genuinely moving. I Will Rot Without You is completely surreal and zoinked out, yet the portrait it draws of loneliness and rejection is harrowing and beautiful.
I Will Rot Without You was part of a IndieGoGo campaign I didn't know existed by cult publisher FunGasm press, which I didn't know existed either and yet it found its way to me. And I'm extremely happy it did. It is a beautiful, elegiac novel - not without humor - that highlights human resilience and the complexity of our longing for connection. I know some of you are turned off by the bizarro tag, but I Will Rot Without You is a gorgeously written surreal literary novel about heartbreak, loneliness and trying to move on when everything collapses around you. Ladies and gentlemen, for the very first time in 2016...
BADASS
* The first being the discovery of internet and my talent with the written word.