Left Hand

the descent into hell is logging into my amazon account and clicking “purchase” on left hand. this is not a novel, it is sitting passenger inside of dr. robert vaughan’s car listening to experimental noise music & the sound of the collision becoming a part of the song. a totally cursed matryoshka doll if the thing was a motel room inside of a motel room inside of a motel without rooms; and with each layer you dissect, it reveals a darker, more depraved incessant rant of a madman who ultimately just wants to find love. just kidding! it’s definitely heroin and snuff films and schoolgirls and not love. it pins you down and rubs your face in its own vomit, and forces you to look into an infinity mirror.if a nuclear bomb is a weapon of mass destruction, the left hand is operating the drone with only its stump to guide it. i truly cannot think of anything worse than not reading this not-vel.

I have finished reading this book. It is definitely a type of literature that’s new to me, haven’t seen anyone wrote like this before. For anyone who’s not into the horror/thriller genre, you might not be able to look through the surface of this book and think it’s just someone’s rant about things that sounds pretty disturbing to you. But for my horror and philosophy fans, this is one of the best reads I had all year, and it’s something worth looking into. Paul Curran’s style is powerful, his words of describing imagery and visceral reactions come from pure talent. I have never seen anyone with this level of skill for burning images into my brain this vividly, fast, and permanent. If you have difficulty reading or understanding it, just follow the words and it’s all about the state of flow.

The way the character bluntly describes his actions and thoughts may be as uncomfortable and weird as you can think. It’s a bit hard to keep up, but the more you read the more you want to keep going. Analyzing Paul’s way of speaking and such was the best part, definitely recommend to read

Books like Paul Curran's Left Hand are hard to review - the 5 star score I gave is meaningless. Everything about it is so fundamentally different, it feels wrong to examine it within the constrained world of modern literature. It is a disgusting, stomach turning, brain breaking, logic defying disaster, it is a hot mess of agony, of numbness, of depraved thoughts. It is so pretentious it loses all pretense, it is surreal, it gives me the creeps, it's a psychotic decay into nothingness, an unfiltered view into the failing mechanisms of a rotting brain. And despite being as niche as it can humanly or inhumanly get - if you stopped at the sight of the cover and wondered what this book is all about, you should perhaps get it and judge for yourself, as every reading will be so painfully unique and subjective. Let it leave a hole inside of you, let the Left Hand leave you hollow.

I really enjoyed the style and how it was written. That to me was a bit unfamiliar which I liked. On the other hand the story itself was a bit more grotesque and had a lot of topics I didn’t truly feel comfortable reading. I’m usually one for quite intense novels but this stuck me disgusting.

really dumb. just shock value tbh. no creativity

This book knows what it is and grinds your nose in it. I can appreciate some of the layers but overall it was not for me.

Zzzzzzzz.....

Shockingly disturbing and bound to keep you dreading from turning the page. One of the most interesting books I’ve ever read. Trust me, it’s worth a read.

"I have not read this novel. I do not read novels."It doesn't matter what terms you try to apply to Left Hand, it will break your terms and break your face, and then tearfully apologise in the midst of self-mutilation. It will murder itself, and then murder you. It will always come back at the worst and best of times.The most beautiful aspect of Paul Curran's Left Hand is its sincerity, its honesty. Through all of the bleak and bloody microscenes, there is no edge — it is not an active shooter with a manifesto; it is a sensitive mind beset by intrusive thoughts and images, a treatise on lonely repetition and a desire for connection, a form of reverse nostalgia where the past and the present are the same squirming mass of familiar organ tissue. Curran pours his heart out without ever truly showing his (left) hand."Most literature is boring, excessively foolish, and suffocates revolutionary cravings."Left Hand is at once prose that wishes it was never born and miscarried poetry. Curran puts the work itself on trial, as if his own childhood were looking at what he had wrought, and can't make its mind up whether to be proud or sickened. It is (autoreflexive) (autocritical) (autobiographical), or none of the above. To the right reader, it has the potential to connect to everything you love in life, and everything you hate. It may bring back memories unwanted, or ones more pleasant. It is equally personal and distant.Forget trying to stuff this work into a neat little category. It is simply literature to be read and returned to, crafted by an author unrestrained."Feel your lips moving to my voice saying thank you."In summary: An engaging study on the artistic anxiety of working in transgressive fields. The unveiling of memory, the shadow-self and their honest contents. An inspirational narrative of unrelenting mutilation and fleshly impermanence. 5/5.