Rock Eater - Book Review. Brutal Literature
Here is the book review in reading format, if you cannot understand my ramble. Rock on reader!
Rock Eater.
At the core of this book, this book is a scream, a howl at the moon, a punch against the rain, a hardened cry for mercy, to beg the blood-soaked gods to stop pushing and punishing young boys, once like him, from collapsed families, into the grave.
Rock Eater has to be one of the most brutal and sheer bloodcurdling experiences I have ever had reading a book, because of its sheer grisly honesty and sad songlike poetry. His trembling words make you feel like he wrote each military experience poem in his dorm bed after a day of sheer brutality. And his post military poems feel like they were written at some whiskey stained bar top.
This book is a hopeful gasp of fresh air, in terms of modern literature, instead of having to rely on the stale air left by the great past writers.
After reading the first few pages of Rock Eater, I couldn’t stop smiling because in that moment I knew, literature is not dead, Rock Eater saw to that, dragging it from the mother fucking grave with its machine gun shrapnel explosive poetry!
Here is a basic explanation of the story. It runs in four parts.
The first part is Boot camp. ‘Parris island.’ The camp he describes as the place of painful transactions, where souls are sold to the soulless. The soulless, men who once had a soul, were once boys like the writer, until they sold their soul to the soulless sergeants before them.
‘They call it the infantry because we’re child soldiers.
17, 18, 19, yes, I was older,
But they broke me just the same; made us all colder.
They put the weight of the world on our shoulders.
As high school seniors we read “Lord of the Flies”
Then spent a year dehumanised,
hazed, terrorised.’
When I checked into the Fleet I realised
We were our very own brand of “Lord of the Flies.”’
Lord of Flies. Rock Eater
The way Mason describes bootcamp is best described as a living nightmare, a place where men get made into bloodthirsty, lead lustrous monsters who love to KILL.
‘We’re Rock Eaters
Whole Lotta Hate
Whole Lotta Weight
We’re Gatekeepers
We’re Hatebreeders
I’m a Rock Eater
I’m a Big Dicked
Murder Demon
Fire Breathin’
Coke Fiendin’
Godless Heathen
Rock Eater - Rock Eater
Excerpt from Rock Eaters
The second part is about his deployment to Syria. His first taste of war. A place of red skies and refugee kids who know more about war than the soldiers deployed there. The way he describes the bombs lighting up the sky is similar to how a poet from the past would talk about a midsummers night dream. Mason seems to mix violence, death, and sheer unwanted truths into something so poetic and beautifully bloodcurdling serene.
Howitzers roared for death and destruction
As if the fiery sun
Painted a masterpiece
In the wide Syrian sky.
Such beautiful chaos.
Syrian Sunsets. Rock Eater
The second part is when the cracks of his toughening starts to show. The wears and tears in his psyche, his constant need for intoxication to silence the anxiety ridden bees.
The particular poem The ballad of Corporal Joselove is a very hitting piece. Showing how a man, a marine, so strong, so tough, so loyal, let loose his mind for one night, sniffing coke, then, the next day, lost everything on a drug test. A brutal true depiction of the reality of life. Reminding me of the line I always say, ‘It takes years to build a life. Seconds to knock it down.
I won’t go on anymore since the rest is to be discovered yourself, otherwise I would give too much way. But the most heart hitting poems in this book is when he returns to his mother, a marine, a success, a hard working man who is fighting for the freedom of his country. These poems brought a tear to my eye.
I could go on and on about this book all day, but I think I have left enough of what to expect.
If you can handle brutal truth read it now.
If not, go away, live a little, hurt a lot, then come back and read it.
Best book of the year. By far.
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