![]() ![]() ![]() There is a very real fear, and possibility, that in reading you might contract the blackdog from the text itself, so virulent is the hopelessness that Kelso’s work details. This is a book of the contained and Ersatz is the world in the corner of the bourgeois eye, the poverty scratching itself into your pupil. In the city of Ersatz depression is real and rightly so, a creature stalking the material conditions of the city's inhabitants. Of that aforementioned list, only Gray has an actual knowledge and understanding of the post-industrial working class and its psychological conditions. In other words, there is as much Victor Hugo and Balzac and Alisdair Gray in Kelso’s vividly realised machinations of a society being digested by moral and economic decay as there is Ballard or Burroughs. Chris Kelso has written a number of acclaimed and prize nominated works spanning a variety of styles and genres, and yet it seems the critical reception of his writing has revolved around a misplaced categorisation of his style, and that this oversight ought to be addressed even if the short handed manner of doing so feels unavoidable within the conscripts of this review. ![]()
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