Book Review : Gabino Iglesias - Gutmouth (2012)

Order GUTMOUTH here

Although I had enough brain power to kow that "good" was nothing but a floating signifier, my feelings were stronger than semiotics and those dictated that I didn't deserve to be locked up. I had never molested kids, cheated MegaCorp or kicked puppies around. 

Every fiction reader I know has been told at least once that their favorite hobby was useless. It probably is the biggest misconception about narrative arts that ever was: creating fictional, alternate destinies is the only way human beings will ever transcend their own. Gabino Iglesias' aggressive and iconoclast debut, a bizarro novella titled Gutmouth, is a mash up of body horror, surrelism, existentialism and cyberpunk that is so insane it could belong to a low-budget straight to video movie, but that uses shock and grotesque in an almost prescient manner in order to portrait contemporary problems under a new, yet pertinent angle.

Set in a dystopian future, Gutmouth is the story of David Dedmon, a man living with a mouth under his navel. That goddamned thing has a British accent and calls itself Phillipe. It's not very nice to its host either. David and Philippe are currently imprisoned on death row by MegaCorp, the demon spawn of Proctor and Gamble, for a crime that Dedmon spends the major part of Gutmouth reminiscing. Before imprisonment, he was dating a stripper with a mechanical leg named Marie and was trying to live an earnest and passionate relationship with her, like in the pre-MegaCorp era. It's not easy trying to recapture spontaneity at the age of corporate omnipotence though.

I have a pretty weak stomach for body horror stuff and Gutmouth doesn't exactly shy away from the strange sex, gruesome mutations and extreme body modifications. Of course, these are meant to shock you and demand your attention, but it's not the only purpose Gabino Iglesias gave them in the narrative. They are a mean of rebellion against corporate culture. There's an entire segment of Gutmouth about a man name Gage doing a procedure called "penis splits" (I'll leave you the surprise), which requires a MegaCorp drug that mixes the pleasure and pain signals in the brain. Gage and his clients affirm ownership of their body through that violent procedure and experience something MegaCorp cannot provide.

Speaking of which, I thought MegaCorp was a sneaky-important part of Gutmouth that nobody really talks about. The novella is set in a distant future, but the idea of a company owning and managing society is not that distant. The majority of you guys are on Facebook, letting its social ethics transform the way you think and exposing yourself to an algorithm that target your interests every time you do something on the platform. Sure, Gabino Iglesias' presentation is a little Orwellian, but the overarching theme in Gutmouth couldn't be any more pertinent: how do you remain yourself in an expanding corporate culture that wants to mold you into something bland and predictable.

The term bizarro makes a lot of sense to describe a novella such as Gabino Iglesias' Gutmouth, because cyberpunk/dystopian/body horror/existentialism/surrealism is a bit winded and intimidating. Gutmouth is a whipcrack smart, yet delirious and provocative story reminiscent of Dostoevsky (on quaaludes), Burroughs and early William Gibson. It was only my second New Bizarro Author Series book - I've read Tiffany Scandal's There is No Happy Ending earlier this year - and I'm starting to get a real kick out of them. They are smart, wildly creative books that have a lot of literary merit. Gutmouth certainly comes across as an iconoclast yarn on first glance, but I don't know many books that nailed the expanding influence of corporate culture with such subtlety and precision.