Rob Hardin's Distorture

DISTORTURE

Profane design by Todd Bushman

Sacred design by Eric Hoffsten

Price: $9.00
ISBN: 1-57366-027-2

IT IS THE END OF THE CENTURY AGAIN:
THE STORIES IN DISTORTURE ARE ELEGAIC,
EXQUISITE PANELS WRITTEN IN MEMORY
OF CERTAIN DECAYED ANGELS.

A woman is buried by the musician who once offered to protect her, and a narcoleptic is found, still dreaming, with cryptic symbols engraved into her back. In an elegant loft, a silver-haired man finds the torso of a comatose surfer, and the bodies of the two men are transformed into an intricate work of art. These are only a few of the tortuous stories of Rob Hardin, a studio musician whose fiction has been called "impeccable" by Dennis Cooper.

Distorture is a fiercely modern book full of jeweled descriptions of violent eroticism. In Distorture, Rob Hardin subverts nineteenth century romanticism and redefines the aesthetics of excess. Distorture splices the digital and the autumnal with the drive of dark ambient music and the elegance of a late Liszt sonata.

"Rob Hardin's beautiful nightmare prose foresees a future ravaged w/sexual disconsolation, boys haunted by girls and girls lost in scarification. His muse is the nyc tenement rat delirious in conflicted greyscale psychosis. Inside the blood and heartbreak, he senses mystery. And he writes w/the terror of love released." -- Thurston Moore

"Distorture is a tingler--lushly perverse and lyrically demented."--Katherine Dunne, author of Geek Love

"Dark is necessary. Dark has to be. If we don't see it, it rules us. Rob Hardin shows it to us, takes command of it, and grandly entertains us too. What rules? Hardin rules. Distorture: a major achievement in the art of prose and cruelty." -- John Shirley, screenplay writer for The Crow

"Rob Hardin, archeologist of serenely cruel eroticism, pierces the layers of his own necropolis to reveal the tragic pleasures of violence, illuminating even the wretched in the light of a singular redemption. Distorture leaves the reader without recourse: chilled to the bone, yet strangely -- and comfortingly -- entangled in a web of phosphorescent prose." -- Amok Journal

"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. I've never seen pop and classical references mixed so well--all for the higher purpose of vengeful sadism." -- Jim Goad, editor of Answer Me!

"Studio musician Rob Hardin uses his classically-trained ear to construct ornate and exquisite literary jewelry. But like Baudelaire's morbid Bijoux, these gems possess a deadly elegance. All twenty-six of these tales are informed by a perversity tragic for its brilliance. Hardin wields the scalpel of his craft like a deranged but masterful surgeon, performing euphonious eviscerations in the name of beauty." -- Morticians Quarterly

Ordering info:
Send check for $9.00
(plus$3.50 shipping and handling) to:
Black Ice Books/FC2
Chicago Distribution Center
11030 South Langley Avenue
Chicago, IL 60628
(Illinois residents please add 8.75% sales tax.)

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