Our monthly focus on new and emerging writers takes place again on Monday night. This month, Debut Mondays will feature Raphael Brous (author of I am Max Lamm) Melanie Joosten (Berlin Syndrome), Dan Disney (And Then When The) and Eli Glasman, whose piece ‘Bag’ is in edition 84 of Voiceworks magazine, subtitled ‘Pulp’.
There’s a beautiful book trailer for Melanie Joosten’s novel on YouTube. Kill Your Darlings have published an interview with Raphael Brous in which the author is asked how he goes about writing a sex scene. Here’s his reply:
I wanted to write a challenging, fearless book that I would enjoy reading, that reflected the animal drives within us. Freud may be scientifically discredited, but the Id is, I think, his most astute allegory. The psychosexual elements of the novel will polarise some readers, but they’re essential to its themes. Sex is ultimately about procreation, about life, and therefore about death. In that sex scene, Max Lamm’s guilt – his guilt in having prematurely ended a boy’s life – disturbingly morphs his sexual relief into something utterly disgusting. I was influenced by the paintings of Francis Bacon, the way that he revoltingly, beautifully explored the domination, the submission, the will to destroy that fuels the sexual act. Guilt is, I suppose, motivated by life; that is, motivated by the increasingly fashionable expectation that we lead something approximating an ethical life. Sex is about death; about creating life and in momentarily reaching, through pleasure, some transcendence above ordinary experience. All that collides in the disturbing sex scene.