Thomas hears voices, and the worst of these voices belongs to a demon called Dinn. In a series of increasingly horrific rants, the demon re-frames Thomas’s declining mental health as a part of a secret training program, an occult procedure designed to cultivate the demons of tomorrow.
In the distorted world depicted by Dinn, gateways to hell lie behind every door. Friends and family are the enemy. And the only way for Thomas to survive his training is to dedicate himself to the demon’s prescribed rituals of loneliness, ill-health, and pain.
Equal parts ferocious and seductive, Mutilation Song is a boundary-shattering horror novel that uses a hallucinatory narrator to explore the extremes of mental illness.
“Reading like the occult love child of Georges Bataille and David Lynch, Hrivnak’s Mutilation Song is an unnerving and surreal meditation on the demons that haunt us and on the nature(s) of evil. Compelling and unsettling, and definitely worth the read.”
—Brian Evenson, author of Last Days
“Lyrical and hallucinatory, Jason Hrivnak’s Mutilation Song is a sensual atrocity, like The Screwtape Letters for demonomaniacs. Imagine the unholy daisy-chain of C.S. Lewis, J.G. Ballard, and Bret Easton Ellis and you have Mutilation Song.”
―Bracken MacLeod, author of Stranded