One of the benefits of my life as journalist and author, is that my editors often give me access to advanced copies of new works.
Last month, I was handed a manuscript called Lives & Minds of C.W. Männe, BINGE, and warned, “You’ll need a dictionary, a rosary and a safe word.” As funny as it sounded at the time, the work has lived up to its billing. I believe it may be a masterpiece. The novel is the most extraordinary material I’ve read in ten years. If you can imagine The Matrix meeting The Old Testament in the jungles of the Amazon, that’s BINGE.
Reading BINGE is like watching a Fellini movie shot in the Amazon.
At once crass and violent and shocking…it is simultaneously the most thoughtful and poetic prose I’ve ever read. The story’s barbarism and profound spiritual insights are mashed together in a way that gave me the feeling of reading on my heels, not knowing what might come next.
Passages of explicit pornography by any standards I’ve been taught, smuggle within them profound spiritual truths that leave me to describe BINGE as “Spiritual Erotic Literature.”
BINGE’s narrative power does not exist in spite of, but because of, it commingling of sacred scripture, ancient hallucinogens, and…well…fucking.
It is a hedonistic hero’s adventure.
For as much time as I have spent contemplating what life was like for Eve in the garden with Adam, I never imagined the mother of creation as a great heifer coursing with sensuality…a woman who slept upon a bed of skulls…or a seductress into whose deep, wet mouth I might one day enjoy. Or, to consider placing towering biblical figures Jacob and Esau, into a life or death battle with a being called The Two-Faced Cunt. It’s all so incredibly shocking, I know. I tell you honestly, I am trembling as I write the word cunt, having set this word outside of my vocabulary my entire life.