A dark love story of obsessive fixation, perceptual disorientation, insomnia, and psychic seizures--with madness waiting in the wings.
"Do you dare to fall in love?" asks the narrator of Self-Murder, and then answers by detailing an instance of attraction to a "breath-stealing" beauty which swiftly becomes an obsessive fixation, such that all else melts from his awareness, his sanity is stretched to its limits, and madness threatens to engulf him. Shifting emotional extremes, sensual excess, and prolonged sleep deprivation: all combine to erode the narrator's tenuous hold on rationality and propel him into a somnambulistic waking state where the distinction between what's real and imagined blurs, and he's no longer able to be certain of how he's behaving; without being aware of it, he may have committed murder.
Self-Murder depicts a hallucinatory landscape of the mind and emotions, as terrifying as it is surprisingly and astoundingly beautiful, while probing the elusiveness of memory and difficulty of accurately apprehending our inner state of affairs--or of understanding the underlying motives of our actions.
Reviews:
"Self-Murder is a fascinating and excellent psychological thriller readers won't be able to put down."--Midwest Book Review
"A phantasmagoria of unbridled lust, sexual obsession, and stealth madness, Robert Scott Leyse's Self-Murder is a dazzling indictment of desire that brims with sensory imagery and moments of exquisite verbal beauty delivered by a narrative voice that is baroque but disturbing and more than a little reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe."--Gary Earl Ross, Edgar Award-winning author of Blackbird Rising: A Novel of the American Spirit
"Robert Scott Leyse channels Baudelaire's Queen of Spades and Jack of Hearts, speaking darkly of dead loves, in this new book. He also reminds me of James Purdy's notorious eccentricity. There's plenty of middlebrow stuff if you want it. Self-Murder isn't that."--Kris Saknussemm, author of Private Midnight
"In Self-Murder, Robert Scott Leyse achieves a striking stylistic gallimaufry: Proustian memories underpinning thoughts, words, and deeds; obsession treated in a way which evokes Lolita; romps that Henry Miller would have enjoyed; a finale that delivers a blow to the solar plexus."--Barry Baldwin, Emeritus Professor of Classics, U. of Calgary, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada
"Self-Murder is lush sensuality of language injected with menace. A vivid portrait of mental disintegration and an explosive picture-show. Hallucinations without substance-abuse. Overwrought nerves and insomnia are Self-Murder's drugs of choice."--George Fosty, ESPN featured author of Black Ice
"Here is a psychological struggle and sensual breakout where you best get a comfortable seat, grab the joy stick, and hang on. Self-Murder is a delicious look at the mystery of self-psychoanalysis, sensual release, acceptance of gifts of the tallest order, or the lowest."--Tom Sheehan, author of Epic Cures