Mordew by Alex Pheby

Mordew

Alex Pheby

Reading Mordew is akin to what I assume is a bad acid trip! Whilst this tome of a Gothic fantasy novel is ambitious, imaginative and readable, it's also vile, nauseating, freaky with, let's be frank, obnoxious characters. When I finished reading it it made me feel like there was dirt under my fingernails that refused to budge. Saying that, it was actually a great book and well worth the hours it took me to finish it.

Extract

The mother turned her head to Prissy and Nathan, looking up at them like she was about to introduce herself, twitching her whiskers. She said nothing though, did not break into a speech like a rat from a tale, but instead she buried her head in the corpse below her, coming back after a struggle with a half-gnawed tube of flesh, quarried from the dead woman's bowel.

Nathan retched. If he had eaten more of the chop, he would have emptied his guts, but it was already digested. Prissy clutched him tighter, as if he was about to throw her off.

'What's going on back there?' Gam called.

Nathan couldn't answer.

'He's going to drop me in it!'

'Why?'

The rat swallowed her meal in one, her huge front teeth no good for chewing, only for ripping, and she went back down for more...

This time when the rat came up, its meal remained stubbornly attached and the rat thrashed about, getting to its feet so that the grubs hung down like udders on a goat.

Parallels
  • Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
  • Lanark: a Life in Four Books by Alistair Gray
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Violence