The Consumer

It's actually a compilation of two M. Gira short story collections, The Consumer and Various Traps, Some Weaknesses, Etc. Some stories mutated into Swans songs.

With each story, Gira exposes not the underbelly of human nature, but, rather, the intestines pulled backwards through the spine with a long, sharp hook. This isn't to say that reading Gira stories is torture -- on the contrary, the eloquent, sometimes dry, prose goes down easy, provided the reader has a cast iron stomach and won't turn away from discourses on incest, violence, necessary rape, raw brutal sex, and other frailties of spirit and morality.

A short sampling, the entirety of the short short story "A Grave":

A Grave

I use this room like a disease uses a body. I corrupt it, eat away at it, mar the walls with my hands. The room stinks of my blood. I'm in my bed. The mattress is rotting beneath me. My urine has eaten a hole in it. My lower back's buried in the hole. I can't tell where my body leaves off and the mattress begins. When I get up and go to the toilette, I tear my body in half.

In other words, think H.R. Giger in print.

List of stories from The Consumer:

• Empathy
• The Dog
• The Coward (II)
• Why I Ate My Wife
• The Orgy
• The Consumer, Rotting Pig
  1. My Prescription for Happiness, by The Rotting Pig
  2. How I Learned To Speak, by R.P.
  3. Notes On Coitus, by R.P.
  4. Homage To My Former Self, by R.P.
• The Young Man That Hid His Body Inside A Horse, or, My Vulvic Los Angeles (with greetings to B.K.)
• The Sex Machine
• The Mute Dwarf Sings
• How I Love Her
• The Great Annihilator, or, Francis Bacon's Mouth
• If I Were Him
• A Sacrifice
• Deflowered
• The Young Boy
• A Contract
• Bloodsucker
• A Woman
• You
• The Initiate
• The Ideal Worker
• The Whore Boy
• Defeated
• A Man
• Raping A Slave
• Blind
• The Boss
• A Coward
• A Grave
• A Trap
• Another Trap
• A Game
• Money's Flesh
• Bastard
• A Screw
• Punishment
• Baptized
• Feeding The Animal
• Her Only Love
• His Childish Games
• Some Weaknesses
• The Caregiver
• Daydreams
• Three Nursery Tales
• Telepathy
• Friends
• I'm An Infant, I Worship Him