David Roden

The Marquis de Sade enters the decimal labyrinth and is immediately intoxicated by the smell of a rotten rose. The Medieval meets the posthuman on the operating table and a hooded woman listlessly drains you for some last scrap of pleasure. “It will be just you and me and a blunt instrument.” We are all bored with our biology, but unable to escape the eros-thanatos skinsuit. Roden’s scrawls from some distant outpost are like the tortured pornography of monks and philosophers, minds addled by abstraction, but labouring ever onwards in shrouds of grey meat. As do we all!
—Nina Power

Sensation carries information, and through extreme sensation one can acquire an abject, alien knowledge – a wholly unique disease of faith. Tracing the symbols with your finger, accept from trepanned skull hallucination alighting synapse, to stir your loins and embolden your endocrine. “In truth, I only ever wanted to be vermin.” The story is a hole (O); a place to be buried in. Containment for the sheer sacs of us. Language blooms and coats us, making our skins visible, for what else would we be without? Here, in Roden’s cities, eroticism is a map, nouns as sex as chrysalis – a space from which to emerge permanently altered and forever unrecognizable.
—B. R. Yeager

A dialectic between the abstract and the absurd. Roden aggressively refuses to provide any relief through emotionality. A fully detached perspective on humanity’s demise with the ascension of the posthuman (i.e., extinction).
—Charlene Elsby

One way to read this story collection is to find its methodology in the work itself, as Roden says, “bukkake holocaust deep, interiorized, so when the load is shot, he’ll chain toxic shocks, vesicles bursting like pomegranates.” It is a work of deep readability, perversion, delirium, gothic romance and posthuman mutation, this is the weird fiction your mother warned you about.
—Tom Bland

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