This Young Monster

by Charlie Fox

Overview

This Young Monster is a hallucinatory celebration of artists who raise hell, transform their bodies, anger their elders and show their audience dark, disturbing things. What does it mean to be a freak? Why might we be wise to think of the present as a time of monstrosity? And how does the concept of the monster irradiate our thinking about queerness, disability, children and adolescents? From Twin Peaks to Leigh Bowery, Harmony Korine to Alice in Wonderland, This Young Monster gets high on a whole range of riotous art as its voice and form shape-shift, all in the name of dealing with the strange wonders of what Nabokov once called ‘monsterhood’. Ready or not, here they come...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781910695357
Publisher:	Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publication date:	06/05/2018
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	936,744
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Charlie Fox is a writer who lives in London. He was born in 1991. His work has appeared in many publications including frieze, Cabinet, Sight & Sound, ArtReview, The Wire and The White Review..

Read an Excerpt

Hey Beast,

There’s a scary picture I want to show you: three kids outside their house, all wearing masks and grinning like devils. One has a crocodile head, another is a cartoon dog covered with funky spots and the last wears a deranged face drawn on a paper bag, eyes bugged, mouth crammed with jackal teeth. They’re dead now. They appear in this book called Haunted Air (2010) collecting old American pictures by anonymous photographers of folk in costume on Halloween. I’m guessing from the fuzziness of the picture that it must have been taken in the 1930s, roughly aligning with the time that Judy Garland crash-landed in Oz. There are tons of other pictures I could have fetched for you – David Bowie on the cover of Diamond Dogs (1974), half-alien, half-hound – or the Count’s shadow climbing the stairs from Nosferatu (1922), but beginning on Halloween seemed like the most potent clue to the festivities up ahead. Ghosts run amok, identities melt, everybody’s in costume, and reality is nowhere to be found. Think of it as an invitation asking you, as Captain Beefheart once howled, ‘to come out and meet the monster tonight!’
You’re one of the first monsters I remember meeting, both as a cartoon in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) and in huge illustrated books where you were usually depicted with a touch of the owl or hog. Almost everybody, if they’re lucky, sees monsters for the first time in fairy tales where the traditional response to their appearance is astonishment. When the Evil Queen in Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs (1937) changes into a witch thanks to her psychotropic potion, even her beloved raven leaps back in fright and hides inside a skull by her cauldron until he’s just an eyeball, panicky, staring out of somebody else’s head.
Scary pictures were one of my earliest obsessions and I’ll try to explain why later on in this dumb fan letter to you, dear Beast. I don’t have a picture of myself to hand: not the snapshot in which I appear wearing a werewolf mask as a small boy on my birthday, or the other where I’m a vampire stalking through wet grass, sun low and red, squinting like a drunk through slender trees. I was a woozy child, the world was slow, it was fun to watch myself disappear in the mirror, face turning full moon white with make-up, fake blood drooling sweetly from my mouth, a little black crayon around the eyes for that buried alive stare: that was my face and yet it was not. When I discovered a new monster lurking in the forest of a film history book – David Naughton in An American Werewolf in London (1981), gazing at the hand that’s no longer quite his own, or Lon Chaney as The Phantom of the Opera(1925), gaunt and scalded by acid – I felt the same shiver: fear speedballing with wonder. I was electrified inside. That was the monster feeling.

Table of Contents

Self-Portrait as a Werewolf | 'The Little Boy Who Can't Be Damaged' | Untitled (Freak) | Herr Fassbinder's Trip to Heaven | 'I Just Adore Extremes' | Transformer | The Dead-End Kids | Spook House | For Arthur and All the Other Mutts

Editorial Reviews

‘My friend Bruce Hainley had told me about a new book coming out called “This Young Monster,” by Charlie Fox, but I had forgotten all about it until the publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions in London sent me this beautifully designed French-flap-style paperback original. Good God, where did this wise-beyond-his-years 25-year-old critic’s voice come from? His breath of proudly putrefied air is really something to behold. Finally, a new Parker Tyler is on the scene. Yep. Mr. Fox is the real thing.’
— John Waters, New York Times

‘Charlie Fox writes about scary and fabulous monsters, but he really writes about culture, which is the monster’s best and only escape. He is a dazzling writer, unbelievably erudite, and this book is a pleasure to read. Fox’s essays spin out across galaxies of knowledge. Domesticating the difficult, he invites us as his readers to become monsters as well.’
— Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick

‘This Young Monster is a hybrid animal in its own right, suturing biographical essays with stranger things: a “dumb fan letter” to the Beast, a meandering confession from Alice, bombed out after her many years in Wonderland [...].There’s not enough of this sort of playfulness and frank enthusiasm in art criticism.’
— Olivia Laing, New Statesman

‘Surreal and provocative, This Young Monster is both a poignant portrayal of life on the margins, and a joyful salute to a group of people who embraced their misfit status to lead beautifully unconventional lives.’
— Lucy Watson, Financial Times

Charlie Fox is a ferociously gifted critic, whose prose, like a punk Walter Pater’s, attains pure flame. Fox’s sentences, never “matchy-matchy”, clash with orthodoxy; I love how extravagantly he leaps between different cultural climes, and how intemperately – and with what impressive erudition! – he pledges allegiance to perversity. Take This Young Monster with you to a desert island; his bons mots will supply you with all the protein you need.’
— Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Humiliation

‘A Rimbaud-like moonbeam in written form.’
— Bruce Hainley, author of Under the Sign of [sic]

‘A performance as original and audacious as any of the characters within – it crackles off the page, roaring and clawing its way into the world, powered by a brilliant vagabond electricity.’
— Chloe Aridjis, author of Book of Clouds

‘Charlie Fox has a cardsharp’s diamond-eye for cataloguing the shapeshifting face of the sublime. His essays slither through skins over the warm flesh where so many mythic worlds and realities connect, from that of Twin Peaks to Diane Arbus, Fassbinder to Columbine, which somehow in their amassment ventriloquise a tender, enchanted end¬notes for our black present. Put on this mask and breathe.’
— Blake Butler, author of 300,000,000

From the Publisher