Vulgar Things
The second novel from Lee Rourke, author of the cult hit ‘The Canal’.
Jon Michaels – a divorced, disaffected and fatigued editor living a nondescript life in North London – wakes one morning to a phone call informing him that his uncle has been found dead in his caravan on Canvey Island. Dismissed from his job only the day before and hung-over, Jon reluctantly agrees to sort through his uncle’s belongings and clear out the caravan. What follows is a quixotic week on Canvey as Jon, led on by desire and delusion, purposeful but increasingly disorientated, unfolds a disturbing secret, ever more enchanted by the island – its landscape and its atmosphere.
Haunted and haunting, ‘Vulgar Things’ is part mystery, part romance, part odyssey: a novel in which the menial entrances and the banal compels.
”'A claustrophobic work that's ripe with alcohol and despair.” - Guardian
”'Sad, lost men looking for maps in the starry Essex sky, small-town strippers, absent mothers, angry brothers, planets photographed on smart phones, cider and a lot of rare steak - Rourke is on his way to becoming the J. G. Ballard of Southend-on-Sea.” - Deborah Levy
”'The poetry of estuary landscapes - muddy creeks, silhouettes of refineries, the slow passage of giant container ships, the flat horizon - shines through Lee Rourke’s prose with a black luminescence.” - Tom McCarthy
”'As poignant and unsettling as a beam of light hitting the night sky from across the far-off wastes.” - Eimear McBride
”'A consistently disturbing yet compelling vision of loss, violence and identity, 'Vulgar Things' stalks the reader’s memory long after the last page. A novel of innovation and resonance, it is as bleak and as beautiful as a deserted coastline.” - Stuart Evers
”'Rourke now shares a publisher with Jonathan Franzen … Admirers may rest assured that in other respects Rourke has not sold out … Rourke writes under the spell of 'The Waste Land' … [For T. S. Eliot] the sense that literature must embrace modern life wrestled with an equivalent urge to grip it in tweezers, nose held. You feel the same tension at work in 'Vulgar Things'.” - Anthony Cummins, Literary Review