Scar Culture

From the beginning of Scar Culture, the reader knows that something has gone wrong: the first-person accounts that form the bulk of Toni Davidson's debut have been found "at the scene." Who has done what to whom is the question driving this novel, moving it beyond the conventions of its psychiatric/criminal frame. In "Click" and "Fright" we are forced up against the more unsettling ways in which children live, or die--the book is part of the contemporary uncovering of the perversity of family life--as well as a few fragile metaphors of survival (if that is what they are). Click takes headshots recording the utter commotion of life with his mother and father, Exit and Panic; Fright passes into a state of waiting for his brother to return, for his (dead) mother "to sing something, anything, into my ear." Sad's narrative starts to pull the book together, or further apart, in its presentation of the madness of analysis, which becomes inseparable from the abuse it is supposed to cure. Within the tradition of a literary challenge to psychotherapy, Scar Culture is taking its chances, too, though it may become, in fact, a powerful contribution to this discipline. --Vicky LebeauTwo profoundly abused patients deemed untreatable by orthodox professionals fall into the hands of a manipulative psychologist almost as damaged as they are. Bored by the "hack work" of standard therapy, he wants to make his name through radical intervention. He sets up elaborate hallucinogenic and regression experiments designed to take his patients back to the scene of the crimes against them in an attempt to rebuild them from the ground up. But in playing therapeutic god, ripping away at their psychic scars, he's courting disaster.

A brilliant debut novel that is destined to challenge the way we think about psychotherapy, Scar Culture is breathtaking, at times shocking, provocative, humane, sharp-witted and always riveting, marking the arrival of an extraordinary new voice.


Genre: General Fiction