Morrissey Releases Novel List of the Lost

Today marks the long-awaited release of Morrissey's debut novel. List of the Lost, the followup to his 2013 Autobiography, is about a cursed relay team in 1970s Boston, MA. Read Morrissey's description below, via True to You.

The theme is demonology ... the left-handed path of black magic. It is about a sports relay team in 1970s America who accidentally kill a wretch who, in esoteric language, might be known as a Fetch ... a discarnate entity in physical form. He appears, though, as an omen of the immediate deaths of each member of the relay team. He is a life force of a devil incarnate, yet in his astral shell he is one phase removed from life. The wretch begins a banishing ritual of the four main characters, and therefore his own death at the beginning of the book is illusory.

Sadly for Moz, the book's first reviews – from the Guardian and the Daily Beast – do not bode well for its critical fortunes. In his Guardian review, Michael Hann urges readers not to buy List of the Lost, calling it "an unpolished turd of a book, the stale excrement of Morrissey’s imagination."

Hann writes that the book "appears to be unedited, the curse of the writer whose commercial clout is stronger than their publisher’s willpower." Then, having described Morrissey's morbid, predatorial view of sex, he writes:

When he comes to describe sex itself, it’s even worse. “Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.”

The Daily Beast's Nico Hines latched on to Morrissey's treatment of women, in a review summarized, "The writing is laughably clunky, the characters thinly drawn, the style stilted. But what’s worst about the ex-Smiths frontman’s List of the Lost is its repulsive treatment of women."

Hines goes on to write:

Perhaps it is a coincidence that some of the bit-part female characters are dismissively sketched, but Morrissey also meditates more explicitly on womankind. “Although the publicly confessed lust of the man must always be made to seem ridiculous and prepubescent, the lust of the woman is at first childlike and desperate—as if they know there is something about which they know nothing, and this itch takes on the aggressive,” he writes. "Women are less of a mystery because their methods and bodies have been over-sold, whereas the male body speaks as the voice calls a halt."

List of the Lost is available to buy via Penguin Books in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

Watch Morrisey's "Kiss Me A Lot" video:

via Jazz Monroe