Scream Queens of the Dead Sea: Sex! Heavy Metal! Linguistics! Book

I wish I would have written a review sooner, when the book and my ideas were all more fresh and vibrant in my mind, but this will do.

I'll start with what I liked.

The book is unlike any other I have read (although maybe that says more about me than about the book). There is no clear plot like we expect in most of our books, instead we get a slice of the narrator's life (who is a fictionalized and dramatized version of Gilad's own experience as a nurse in a mental hospital). We're introduced to characters haphazardly: told we've heard enough about them before we know anything more than their name. Gilad frequently breaks the fourth wall, most of the time quite humorously (at one point he insists that he is absolutely no misusing his omniscient power as the narrator to give a character cancer). The book jumps from place to place, with conversations cutting each other off and resuming at random. In short, Gilad refuses to pretend that his novel is merely a novel. He doesn't try to package everything in a sensical way or ignore the thoughts we might be having.

It is also full of irreverent and dark humor as well as sexually graphic and violent detail.

It also leaves a lot unexplained and thus open to interpretation. Some things just happen or are said and then the book moves on. It is up to us as readers to use the context of the book and our own knowledge and experience to decide what those things mean. I like this in books because it requires a further keel of mental effort and engagement that helps you retain and extend the ideas of the book.

Now to the things I disliked:

Well, there wasn't much I disliked (except for one bit of necrophilia, but don't let that detail deter you), but there were several areas I found lacking.

For one, at the end of the novel, I wasn't exactly sure what to think. Not because it was ambiguous or because I was hoping to be spoon fed a thesis, but because it seemed like the novel lacked purpose. It seemed to me the way some of my essays for school go: I start out enthusiastically, with a strong and interesting beginning, but then lose my way somewhere along the middle without quite pinning down what I wanted to say, and then just ending it because it's fucking COMM 114. Perhaps the right thing to say here is that the book lacks maturity. Of course, as a nineteen year old college sophomore with one English class under his belt and a three-thousand word paper as his most significant work of writing, this is a statement I am qualified to make. It's also possible to see this as a contradiction of my statement earlier that the novel lacks plot and instead gives us a slice of life (which I listed as a positive), but I don't think that's necessarily true. It's possible for a work of art to lack the standard structure and still have a motive or message with enough depth to be analyzed (Inside Llewyn Davis is a good example of this).

I also think that many of the patients were not too distinct, almost treated as a blob of a character (although I thought Abe Goldmil is especially interesting. Without covering him with my own interpretation, all I can say is pay attention to him and especially his conversation about his writing). But that is more of a preference than a real criticism and it's possible that this was a stylistic, intentional, and meaningful choice that flew over my head.

Overall, I loved the book, which is perhaps weird to say for something I gave three stars. But I think part of my feelings are colored by the fact that I know Gilad Elbom (he was a professor in my writing class this past term), get along with him quite well, respect him, and think he is hilarious. All of those qualities are certainly imbued in my feelings towards the book, so I was coming in already loving it. But I didn't give it three stars just as an attempt to play 3-D chess with my feelings. I have it three stars because, as much as I loved the book, it's not something I would tell someone they HAVE to read or that I would ecstatically recommend to anyone. If I knew the right person and felt they would especially appreciate, only then would I recommend it enthusiastically. The book is nothing profound, but it is hilarious, unlike many books I've read, diverse in its content (full of poems written by Golmil, anecdotes about heavy metal, and it even teaches you a good bit about linguistics). I absolutely think it's worth a read, but I don't think it's a necessary read (but who knows what the hell that even means).

Also, I talked to Gilad and he has some similar feelings about the maturity of the book. He actually told me that he was embarrassed by it (although obviously not extremely so, he did share the title of the book with our class, after all) because he set out to write the most lewd, dirty, and crass book possible, and he achieved that. We also joked about the fact that reading your own writing is incredibly difficult, because it is impossible to tell if it's any good. He actually has two other books that he feels are far better and more mature, but he has not been able to get them published.

And now I'm at the end of my review, written on my iPhone notes after a day of manual labor, a thousand miles away from home. Sure, I could wait to tidy it up or refine my thoughts, but who the hell cares (maybe the one person who reads this? Probably not)?