![]() ![]() First published by the author in 2006, the book has slipped on and off the charts ever since, apparently dependent on the occasional tweet or other online comment. Some books catch on immediately, others take their time, but "Oxygen Thief" has really followed the scenic route. 'Who the hell is it?' I think it's a very powerful place to write." The author went unnoticed outside this Manhattan bookstore recently despite high demand at that location. "It couldn't be more naked, but at the same time. "It has an unusual negative space," says the author, who on email uses the names Tom Wilkinson and Stanley Easyday and prefers to be identified as O2Thief. Known to his growing fan base as "Anonymous," he has given us one of the more unusual self-published successes: "Diary of an Oxygen Thief," a 147-page fictionalized memoir, or autobiographical novel, depending on how much of this story of a recovering alcoholic and the damage he has inflicted and absorbed you care to believe. Women still feel the need to understand the black undertow of the male psyche, and Anonymous shows one brutal face of it very clearly.Īn important book for today’s bubbled zeitgeist, if not just for the debate.NEW YORK - The fair-skinned man with the hoodie and dark ski cap sits on a bench outside McNally Jackson Books in downtown Manhattan, where neither patrons nor employees seem aware that he's the author of a work so in demand at the store that it's often out of stock. And yet, this book is a cult classic with the hipster Feminista, selling out in small bookshops that cater almost entirely to this demographic in both the UK and US. Is it unnecessarily violent and coarse? Yes. However, it is a good example of what self-published turned bidding-war-echelon-published can look like. It would have also benefitted from a developmental edit before it was published. The writing does err on the self-published side at times, and could have done with being a little longer as the ending is rushed. What are privileged white men to do with their status? Where do you go from the top? This one decides a battery of revenge on the gamey female is the only solution. It’s a cynical heave at the privileged white male gone awry as American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and The Sandman by Miles Gibson were before it, something the writer was already feeling in the water in 2006. It’s not, as the critics have puzzlingly said, a “hilarious” read. There are many points that will sting with reality, such as the way he lines women up to date, and the woman who tries to woo him with a “bullshit vegetarian meal” that still bubbles on the stove uneaten as he rapes her on the kitchen floor. ![]() There is a raw, nerve-catching edge of male angst on show that is rarely talked about. It would be an interesting experiment to read this book in one sitting, though it’s doubtful any reader would be able to shake it off easily if they did. There is space for the reader to crawl away in disgust, but the pace leads on to take in yet another nugget of pain. Short sentences pepper the page, doing their job to get the story out. The irony is that the reader will also be using their eyes to experience in detail his sick experiences. ![]() Some women seem to be playing the same game as him, “whatever that is,” he says. He also says that their eyes draw him in. He says he has honest eyes that helped him dupe girls into loving him. As his exploits grow increasingly sadistic, he both semi-rapes and beats up women, without pleasure or remorse.Įyes are a theme. At the beginning of the book, he is careful to tell us he has never physically hurt a woman. When he is dumped unceremoniously and left heartbroken and angry by his long-term girlfriend Pen, he decides on a suicide mission of emotional sexual attacks on any girl that he can get into bed. The protagonist is struck with the curse of being a handsome and magnetic flâneur, a drunken creative to whom women gravitate, and fall in love. The hype that follows this book is intense, and continues today even after ten years, and will be the primary reason any reader may pick this book up.Īn Irish ex-alcoholic creative confesses to his past emotional abuse of women, with the opener, “I liked hurting girls.” Somewhere between JT Leroy and Bret Easton Ellis, the anonymous author looks back with some regret – and some pride and sentiment – to the times that have shaped him to reach the place he greets us from, a near-future from the events told. It is impossible to know if this book is literally a confessional of someone who then published as fiction, because the author remains unknown.
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