Charlene Elsby

// MUSOS

*This book contains content that some may find triggering. If you’d like more information please feel free to reach out <3

"Every human being in MUSOS has the flesh of every other human being in their stomach. To read MUSOS is to taste their unctuous gorge." – John Trefry, author of PLATS and founder of Inside The Castle

“A masterful exploration of obsession, tortured self-consciousness, and the transcendent allure of murder, which can be suppressed for a time but never overcome. At once philosophically expansive and physically relentless, Elsby has given us a first-person narrator as slippery as the best of Nabokov's, and an arena of violence as unflinching as the best of the New French Extremity, all of which somehow coalesces into a poignant story of true love.” – David Leo Rice, author of The New House

"MUSOS is the most damning and incisive portrait of humanity and selfhood I've ever encountered. It is somehow operatically grandiose and entirely stripped-down. Elsby is the rare soul who can channel darkness and transform it. I will never, ever forget hearing her read the concluding pages of this book aloud. Its power radiates; it is more force than book." – Lindsay Lerman, author of What Are You

“Sartre says hell is other people, Wittgenstein says it’s yourself. In Musos, Charlene Elsby confronts something more terrifying: we desire the hell in others.” – Andrew J. Wilt, author of Age of Agility and founder of 11:11 Press

“If first-person narrative devices imply the interiority of an author, then they also imply the exteriority of a reader. Reading Musos is to be ingurgitated by another body, into the limbic andrologies of a subjective desperation, the acerbity of which is the surprising violence of intimacy, that terrible torture which arises from the potential that we are forever incomplete.” – Evan Isoline, author of DƐVDMVTH and founder of 𝗦𝗟𝗙𝗙𝗖𝗞 ∞

“‘No one dies of death in general,’ though this book will make a CORPSE out of you. Elsby is a master of not only time, but the reader’s. She freezes you and delights in the way you look when you come out of your thaw. It’s fucking culinary, wagyu grade text. This is not a blurb, it’s me wishing you luck. She’s going to ruin your life.” – Barracuda Guarisco, author of books and Editor-in-Chief of @rlysrslit