The Black Dog Eats the City by Chris Kelso

In many ways this book is the most accurate and affective rendering of clinical depression that I've read. A depressive nihilism is not the event in this work but rather the environment and the metaphysical horror of that, of being consumed by the mere toll of being, is the position that the reader must go through, must back themselves to go through, in order to experience the work. You can feel depression emerging, taking physical shape, from the ambient pervasiveness of this in his prose.

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.

The Black Dog Eats the City by Chris Kelso