Jackdaw

'A wild, darkly comic nightmare set on the borderlines of creativity, imagination and madness.' Guardian 'Thompson's prose, contaminated by Bacon's unflinching view of the human animal, makes for vital, unsettling reading' - Will Maclean, author of The Apparition Phase In this shocking, and at times darkly comic, novel, a psychiatrist hired to write a short piece on Francis Bacon becomes obsessed with the artist, his life, and the characters who surrounded him. As he becomes consumed with the need to understand Bacon, and to create his own art, his grip on reality becomes increasingly tenuous, and he is haunted by disturbing figures. This short, bold piece of fiction, explores how the passion needed to create art can also destroy the artist.

About the Author :
Born in London to Yoruba parents, Tade Thompson is a writer best known for his Arthur C Clarke Award- and Nommo Award-winning novel Rosewater, and the Shirley Jackson Award nominated novella The Murders of Molly Southbourne. His novels, novellas and short stories have also been finalists for the Locus Awards, the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Award and the British Science Fiction Award, among others. He lives and works in the United Kingdom.

Review :
A wild, darkly comic nightmare set on the borderlines of creativity, imagination and madness. Jackdaw is an original and compelling account of a writer so desperate not to short-change his subject that he descends into a cycle of degradation and madness. This darkly weird thunderbolt of a novella ... By the end you can practically taste the tang of scorched earth in the air. A darkly brilliant meditation on art, obsession and identity. Jackdaw blurs the lines of fiction and memoir and reality itself, and the result is as disturbing as it is thrilling. Tade Thompson, this mad genius, somehow created a literary equivalent of a Francis Bacon painting. I'm in awe. Like Joyce's Nighttown sequence, Jackdaw dwells timelessly along some ever-undefined border between dreams, the actual, the creatively imagined, and hard-edged hallucination. It is brutal, unremitting and, very much in its own steadfast manner, brilliant. A wild and febrile romp through the author's brilliant imagination, this is a fever dream of a book which depicts an unsettling, absurd and sometimes comedic transgression of social norms and an ascent to the glorious echelons of madness. By turns disturbing and hilarious, Jackdaw gets closer to Bacon's appalling truths about humanity and the treacherous flesh that embodies it than any non-fictional work could do ... Thompson's prose, contaminated by Bacon's unflinching view of the human animal, makes for vital, unsettling reading. The most disturbing work of horror Thompson has produced.