That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote by K.J. Bishop (1 star)

I almost never give up on a book but this one beat me. I'm here for weird, and dark, and really weird, but this was too much. I think the first few sections/stories were OK, but when I got to "Maldoror Abroad" and it turned into this LSD bullshit:

You, my witness – I saw your eyes under the bed, like two luteous and patient tombolas waiting for a Napoleonic child to grasp them and roll them into war – might decide that by sparing this woman the torments of childbirth I performed a charitable deed. I had no such need to justify myself, my mouth staying as solemn as a toad’s while I murdered her, my shadow on the wall jerking like the silhouette of a man dying at the end of a rope. It was a pleasure to remove the unborn child, the little homunculus, and throw it on the fire.

and

But still, you shall have a garden where the sky sleeps upon a roof of dark leaves and ivies bind Apollo in a green spell, moss grows like a mineral, and herms endowed with speech plead for caresses; and you shall have a room, an octagonal salon lined in silk of your favourite colour, with a carpet of living serpents and a dome girdled by a circular frieze in which the whale rises endlessly to engulf the last individual plankton.

I couldn't do it anymore. Maybe I should have just skipped that section and kept going, but I didn't have any reason to believe the rest of the novel is different. Reading other reviews of people who like this book, a lot of them talk about skipping sections, so maybe it gets better?

1 star.