Michael

By Henry Flesh

Stephen is an ill, unemployed proof reader with a persistent sensation of being trapped in his body. Approaching fifty, he has lost to AIDS almost everyone who mattered to him - including his lover, Robert, dead now for three years. As Stephen's television broadcasts frightening news about a perilous crisis in Russia, he is visited by three initiates of a strange religious cult, the Children of Michael, who inform him that the Archangel Michael is coming and that the End Time is imminent. Is it real, or is this the fever dream of a man terrified of his lonely mortality?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1888451122
• ISBN13: 9781888451122
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: Akashic Books
• Length: 119 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.2" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A truly haunting novel

I love and am haunted by this book because of the way Flesh is able to convince me that the end of the world really will happen on a hot Sunday in the Village -- that we will ascend, intertwined with our memories. The beauty and poignance of Michael are sometimes too much to bear. As with Flesh's other work, this is an exploration of loneliness, perfectly pitched -- Flesh knows the way cigarette smoke looks floating out a bedroom window, and the desperation of a man whose loved ones have ceased to be. And yet, at the end, there's salvation -- or seems to be. Anyway, Flesh has recently been compared to Burroughs and Genet, but in his deepest explorations of the stark human soul reminds me more of the late Richard Yates.

Modern life during wartime...

Michael is at once disturbing and deeply moving. Set in the East Village of New York in an apocalyptic future with Blade Runner atmospherics, the reader is immediately immersed in a world of both terminal despair and an odd excitement. It is not at all surprising, in such a place, that portents appear. We experience viscerally every memory, every thought, every action in an ambiance of anxiety, dread, and even joy. Michael is a work of intense, impassioned realism, unlike any book I have read before.

The dream of life -- and not just a homoerotic tale

In Henry Flesh's fantastic new book, we are taken on a dream journey and granted a moving meditation on the nature of memory, loss and mortality -- all under the insidious, still massively encroaching specter of AIDS. As the story begins, Henry Flesh's new fatalistic protagonist, Stephen, is in mourning over his dead lover and still trying to reconcile himself with his turbulent past -- a past filled with glimmering joys, abandonment and regret, at which point his growing dread takes human form as he receives a portentous visitation: three (as in the mystical number) members of a religious cult, the Children of Michael, appear at his door, cheerfully announcing that the end is near. "The Archangel Michael is coming." This sets up the rest of the narrative, in which we are taken down the corridors of man's mind, his ravaged memory, and a kind of hot fever dream coinciding with a stunning development: news of the break-out of actual nuclear war, between Russia and a former Soviet Republic, and -- in a kind of spectacular wish-fulfillment fantasy - no less than the end of the world as we know it.Haunting, soulful and deeply moving - this is a wonderful book by an important artist. I can only wonder where Henry Flesh will take us next.