Book Review : Chuck Tingle - Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt (2015)
* Audience suggestion, January 2017 *
Ugh.
I suppose this requires some context.
Chuck Tingle is somewhat of an internet sensation. He writes gay erotica that features dinosaurs, unicorns, politicians, shark and other real and imagined monsters. Tingle wasn't THAT famous until his story Space Raptor Butt Invasion was nominated for a Hugo Award last year, which happened because a right wing interest group voted him. He turned his disagreement into another short story and further profit. He was only of marginal interest to me until his canonical story Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt ended up on audience suggestion list earlier this month. I thought twice about reading (and posting a review of) this thing because I didn't see the interest: it either looked like an obnoxious attempt at juvenile humor or something only gay people with twisted fantasies would enjoy. Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt turned out to be neither, which is why I believe we should talk about it.
Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt is the story of Kirk, a young researched employed in a scientific lab working on cloning technology. The facility is allowed to operated by the government on the condition they don't use test subjects: the only people they're allowed to run tests on is themselves! Each employee takes turn at being subjects themselves and Kirk eventually has to do it. The good people at Rubble Biological Labs don't exactly know what they're doing, so what comes out of the cloning booth isn't Kirk's doppleganger, but a sentient copy of his own ass. Kirk's ass is very much his psychological clone. He knows everything Kirk knows, everything he likes and when his employers allow him to take his ass home for the night, you can imagine how this thing ends up, right? I'm sure you've read sex scenes before but never sex scenes like THAT.
Where does the miracle of science end and magic begin? Some people would say never, that "magic" is nothing more than something we can't understand yet, but eventually will. Just because a force seems mysterious and exotic, doesn't mean that it can't be quantified later on.
The first half of Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt was oddly compelling. Chuck Tingle is clearly influenced by H.G Wells' Island of Dr. Moreau, even featuring an old school, epistolary narrator. The story doesn't consist in letters, but they're narrated with the strange fondness of someone remembering things long passed. Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt's main theme is narcissism, though Kirk is basically fucking himself at the end of the book. A deformed, hypersexualized version of himself. The wings basically symbolized that Kirk's butt is a fantasy. Chuck Tingle is saying that romance is selfish business. That people loves themselves first and foremost and the act of wining and dining is just a masquerade that leads to the ultimate act of self-satisfaction: ejaculation. I guess Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt is pretty deep for a book that's also about fucking. I hate to admit it but it's kind of brilliant for what it is.
I guess there's an added value to Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt if you're homosexual. The sex scene is probably titillating because 1) it's very long and 2) there's a dramatic progression to it. It's not just in-your-face provocation. Chuck Tingle deliberately tries to be sexy. I've read it myself until jizz started flying all over like Spiderman's webs. I'm a lightweight when jizz other than my own is involved, so I hovered over the last part of the book. Anyway, the question remains: should you read Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt or any other Tinglers? It has very little interest to it outside of novelty, to be honest. The only reason why I would go back to Chuck Tingle is to read his metacommentary on world events. Tingle is smart, he can write, but I can't in good conscience recommend paying for 30 pages short story that invariably finish in an explosion of raw sex if you don't have a further motive to do so. Some would say it's a metaphor for our times and they're probably right, but I "get" this one already. No need to read it again.
