Untamed

Anything bad you think you’ve done Jack Grisham has done worse. Trust me. Any edged-up, fucked out, terminally violent, self-lacerating hell-party you may have staggered into, Grisham got his mail there before you arrived and long after you slimed out. The legendary author’s experience doesn’t just inform Untamed, it-par-boils every sentence. Even his commas seem to burn… Some writers live life and write about it, others survive unspeakable extremes and, against all odds or reason, explode into words that don’t just tell a story but grab the reader, peel off his skin, deep fry his eyeballs, dip his nerves in acid and drag them across the floor to some kind of revelation they don’t have names for. Every tale in Grisham’s wild and ugly/beautiful collection, Untamed, singes with its own involuntary intensity. These stories will make you avoid mirrors; they implicate while they enlighten…I have seen things in my life, and I’ve even done a few, but I have never read anything like what’s between the covers of Jack Grisham’s latest. Untamed lets us know there is a god - and he probably hates you. Jerry Stahl, author.