Review: GENEROUS BOSOM PART TWO by Conor Stechschulte

GENEROUS BOSOM PART TWO by Conor Stechschulte

Published by Breakdown Press

Available Here

The last time I was confronted with Conor Stechschulte’s Generous Bosom, I needed the help of Jason Sacks to help me unpack my reaction to it. What Stechschulte is doing in this series demands a completely different kind of careful reading than almost any other book I’ve encountered. There are strata of storytelling that requires an abdication of conception and a surrender to the moment that is virally uncomfortable, almost a renunciation of cohesion, an immersion into the pure artistic moment.

Not to belabor the point, but in Generous Bosom there is a fog to comprehension, a wading into a miasma and effluvium of risographed diagonals of nausea inducing colors and almost sketched moments of heart-rending trauma, as if pieces of a puzzle are strewn about the room in order to ape some sort of madhouse feng shui. There’s a moist desperation that occurs in the experience of reading it, as if apperception is foot race you’re running with shin splints.

And yet it pulls you in and straps you down. Stechschulte is pressing the launch button, shooting you into dense places outside your grasp. It’s thrilling and fascinating and acts as a wake-up call experience that almost makes it seem as if all that you’ve been reading prior has been produced by somnambulists.

Breakdown Press calls Generous Bosom “an erotic psychological thriller charting the fallout following a stranded motorist’s unexpected encounter with a strange, isolated couple.” Yes. This is what’s at the center of this book, but Stechschulte is playing with reveals and motivations and secrets as much as he is imparting a plot, and the end of Part Two seems to point in unfathomable directions given where the story has dwelled up until then.

In part, Generous Bosom is a game of trust. With each turn of the page, you are left falling backward with your eyes closed and your arms folded against your heart hoping that Stechschulte is an honest enough artist to catch you and keep your skull from splitting open on the concrete. Stechschulte has earned my trust with books like The Amateurs, so I’ll keep reading Generous Bosom and leave my crash helmet to gather dust on the top shelf of the hall closet.

You can (and should) pick up a copy of Generous Bosom Part Two here.