Dirtmouth

A mystery in two voices, Dirtmouth recounts the grisly murder of a young woman on Blackman's Heath, an ancient execution site in the Irish bogs. A pair of archaelogists, the obese and decadent Kraft Dundeed and his furious protégé Roscoe Taste, each contest the other's self-justifying account of the crime while professing passionate love for the victim. Two silences frame their quarrel: Cinna McDermond, the brutalized subject of her lovers' confessions, and a nameless Investigator, whose invisible presence embodies the reader's. Against this backdrop of subterranean savagery, the competing monologues struggle to unearth a violence neither can fully remember or forget.

Dirtmouth is the third in a triad of novels by Alan Singer which investigate the entanglements of memory, self, and duplicitous will. As in Singer's Memory Wax and the tour de force The Charnel Imp, Dirtmouth's luxuriant prose enacts its narrators' labyrinthine rationalizations, entangling action in grotesque imagery and dark insinuation, much as Blackman's Heath engulfs its Bronze Age victims. Singer's writing recalls the stylistic virtuosity of John Hawkes and Djuna Barnes and the obsessive ruminations of Beckett's and Poe's narrators. Drawing readers into an interrogation room as vast and constricted as the mind, Dirtmouth explores the archaeology of passion, exhuming crimes that mirror our own.

"Here is an archaeology of the dismembered and reawakened body, a tale, a tongue, that unearths love and thought and makes you breathe mortality itself."

—Joseph McElroy