Roughhouse

Fiction. ROUGHHOUSE, Thaddeus Rutkowski's first book, gives a harrowingly deadpan account of the tedium, casual violence, and deviant sex lacing together a surreal, semi-rural childhood with adult urban neurosis. Rutkowski laces his in-your-face punk realism with touches of the surreal and subversive black humor. Sex is emotional karate, social intercourse is toxic ... His sulfuric tale of family breakdown and fetishism chronicles the confusion and opacity of traumatic childhood even as it criticizes the American society that tolerates such inhumanity-- Publishers Weekly. Rutkowski gives us a novel in bites and slices: sharp, shocking, and certainly not for the faint-hearted. Here is gall with gusto, a voice of reckoning, and writing to be reckoned with-- Molly Peacock.