Getting It in the Head: Stories - Hardcover

McCormack, Mike

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805053719 ISBN 13: 9780805053715

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1998

Synopsis

Sixteen stories deal with the harsh violence of modern life in a world where kids make bombs, sculptors dismember themselves for art, and layabouts murder their parents

About this title

Review:

Forget shamrocks and leprechauns--the Ireland of Mike McCormack's imagination is a hellish stew of ax-murderers, self-mutilators, and homicidal toddlers. And these are the humorous stories. The 16 stories Getting It in the Head comprises are by turns grisly, sinister, macabre, and occasionally sacrilegious. The best of them are also undeniably funny in the blackest sense of the word. What kind of a mind, one wonders, would conceive of a character like Thomas Crumlesh, an artist who is literally willing to die for his art by having pieces of himself surgically removed and put on display? Told by the surgeon who performed the operations, "Thomas Crumlesh 1960-1992: A Retrospective" is absolutely deadpan as it details the title character's death by a thousand cuts: upon viewing Thomas's severed arm at a small exhibition of avant-garde art, the doctor intones: "I had no doubt but that I was looking at a postmodern masterpiece." Numerous references to Thomas's future only add to the surreal comedy: after the doctor agrees to perform two operations a year, Thomas "thanked me profusely, pumping my left hand with his, telling me he could rest easy now that his future was secure. In a magniloquent moment that was not without truth he assured me that I had made a friend for life." Naturally a story about multiple amputations is bound to be grisly, and McCormack spares the reader nothing as he describes Crumlesh's final masterpiece.

Not every story in Getting It in the Head is as gruesome as "Thomas Crumlesh" or as disturbing as the title story in which two siblings end up locked in a murderous game of dice. In the charming "The Reach of Love," McCormack explores marital and familial love from a child's perspective while in "Estrogen" he recounts a slightly wacky tale of a "cross-dressing queer, part-time hermaphrodite, and owner of a subsistence farm" and his quest for the breasts for which he's always longed. The occasional sweet tale in McCormack's otherwise fierce repertoire gives readers time to catch their breath before they plunge again into the dark regions of Mike McCormack's fertile, brilliant imagination.

About the Author:

Mike McCormack lives in Galway on the west coast of Ireland, and is at work on his first novel, Crowe's Requiem, which will be published by Holt in 1998.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0805053719
• ISBN 13: 9780805053715
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 243