Headcheese

De: Jess Hagemann

Narrado por: Loreley Lester

The day that Lorrie "accidentally" cuts off her little toe, she discovers what it's like to be able-bodied and not want that body.

After Bartholomew loses his left arm to a landmine, he's inspired to start a new kind of church—one where both amputation and sex are types of performance art.

Trice, a prosthetics engineer, receives the assignment of a lifetime when he's asked to rebuild his son's crippled frame.

Haunted by the memory of his dead wife, George must take the ultimate measure to excise her ghost. For good.

From sexual fetish to the clinical diagnosis of body integrity identity disorder, Headcheese makes the first cut, peeling back the epidermis to peer inside the minds and hearts of 26 people navigating the topography of flesh.

Jess Hagemann is an award-winning author and accomplished biographer. She lives in a quiet Austin neighborhood surrounded on three sides by cows. Headcheese is her first novel.

©2020 Jess Hagemann (P)2022 Mark Alan Miller

Genre-bending body exploration

A difficult book to categorize or describe, but not to appreciate and enjoy.

Essays, stories, documents about voluntary amputation, dysmorphia, and body image. The tone is effectively flat and clinical, but unflinching, straddling a fictional Mary Roach mashed up with Chuck P.

I love how the narrative never really opines on its subjects. Is this horror, erotica, documentary, case study? That’s up to you. These people simply are, except of course that most of them are made up. Fascinating and fun. The narrator was perfect for the job - flat affect, pleasant but clinical, and almost unnoticeable.

I received a free copy of this book on audiobooksunleashed and have given my honest thoughts.

I’ve Never Read a Book Like This Before

Interesting premise grounded with a lot of real world facts. You dip in and out of so many narratives it can sometimes feel like a fever dream. Not for the squeamish, but I wouldn’t describe it as gratuitous, any gore stems from real human emotion and willing participants who you end up having a better understanding of by the end of the novel. Terrific performance Ms. Lester, there’s a ton of characters to keep track of and they do a fantastic job of inhabiting all of them.