Empire of the Senseless

Empire of the Senseless continues Kathy Acker's brilliantly original exploration of the postmodern art of fiction with a story set some time in the future - a bleak, postrevolutionary world in which our society lies dying amid its own ruins."An elegy for the world of our fathers," as the author calls it, the novel evokes a hauntingly familiar country of the imagination experienced by two terrorists and sometime lovers: Thivai, a young man who has wanted to be a pirate for as long as he can remember, sailing the seas to slaughter his victims in order to watch the blood gushing from their bodies; and Abhor, part robot and part human, who met Thivai when she walked into his apartment pointing a Luger at him. Abhor's father had forced her to yield to his sexual demands, and her mother had killed herself because she was unable to live without the husband she hated.Together and apart, the two undertake an odyssey of graphic and savage sexual carnage, a holocaust of the erotic painted in the fearsome colors of blood and death. In Paris, once the city of light, Algerian revolutionists take to the streets to seize power under the banner of the Third World. The terrorists and the wretched of the earth are in command, marching down a road charted by Genet to a Marseillaise composed by Sade.Empire of the Senseless demolishes literary conventions with a supercharged glee turned into ferocious violence, and a language as stark and shocking as the hellion future world it invokes. More than in any of her earlier novels, Acker here blasts away at the debris covering our senses with an audacity unmatched by any other writer of contemporary fiction. -- Book Jacket