Gene Gregorits – Dog Days Volume One
If you only buy one book about a dog killing, self
mutilating, drunken, drug fucked failed writer this year make it Dog Days.
It would be easy to say that Gene Gregorits
is knocking of Charles Bukowski and sure Dog Days does have hints of Bukowski’s
novels (wanna be writer, drunk, sexual antics) but whereas Buk was a working class
bum, a man who was comfortable in the environment of shitty dives and bars,
factories and hookers, you get the feeling Gregorits is never really comfortable,
he uses them as an escape, a place to hide but he’s not one of them, he’s a man
with aspirations, with a sense of being better, even if his aspirations for the
most part seem to be to just get fucked up and to escape from the world around
him. At times brutal and confronting
(hell any book that starts with a rape scene isn’t going to be light reading!) the
reality is that this is a love story, just not your conventional one. Sure there’s a girl (or two) involved but
really his love was his cat Hank and this is the story of a man struggling to
come to terms with the loss of that love. It’s that underlying storyline, that
sensitivity, the stuff Gregorits tries and fails to hide that makes the
difference, dragging this ‘anti-memoir’ up from the gutter and into the fresh
air, that makes you want to read more to see if this drunken, self loathing,
self centred prick can redeem himself because if he can, then maybe we have a
chance too.
