A Necessary Review Of Morrissey's Mind-Bendingly Bad Novel, List Of The Lost - Balls.ie

Preface:
On the most recent edition of The Reducer, we branched out beyond our football remit to encompass List of the Lost, Morrissey's shockingly putrid novel. (Yes, that Morrissey). Co-host Seamas O'Reilly enjoys a lonely reign as a kind of Morrissey Fiction Laureate, having previously written a review of the novel that was longer than his college dissertation. With his benevolent permission, we are reproducing that review in full below. The review was first published in October 2015 on his personal website Shocko.info.

Excerpt:
"In common with every other gangly, box-limbed dork with a library card, my adolescence was defined by these kinds of notions. This time of my life was underscored by a steady click-track of mortifying pretension, and memories of all this pomposity and sexual frustration kept flooding back as I read Morrissey’s List of the Lost. Firstly, because the book is about a group of teenage friends but also, sadly, because this novel is so cosmically off-putting and pretentious that even my fifteen-year-old self would have balked at its contents.

Like everyone else, I read the reviews and thought, at the very least, this would be an interesting read. This was not the case. But I should admit that some of the mentions it received were so savage, I half-thought there had been a healthy degree of needless exaggeration. It was with this small hope that I read the one review that wasn’t fully negative. It was on the back of the book."

A 47 minute podcast discussing it is also included - here's a direct link:
Episode 20 - Morrissey's Novel, List of the Lost.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/force-cdn/highwinds/reducer/morrissey_final_.mp3

A very long deconstruction/article of LOTL and similar audio of said:
https://www.balls.ie/the-reducer/morrissey-novel-390800

Not sure why this appeared today after almost 3 years since release though?
Regards,
FWD.
 
Indeed. If the editor had worked on just about any other book by a well-known writer, he or she would have almost definitely lost their job.
I'm sure someone must have been quietly carpeted over it. Had this been written by anyone other than Morrissey, there is no way it would have been published. It's just too terrible. Penguin - already criticised for caving in to Morrisey's demand to have Autobio published as a Penguin Classic - were made a laughing stock over this one.
 
I know that hardly anybody read more than five pages of the book but I bet it sold a shed load. Penguin can console themselves with that. I wouldn't imagine anyone will ever say, 'I'm not going to buy from Penguin 'cause they had that really shit Morrissey book'.
 
I know that hardly anybody read more than five pages of the book but I bet it sold a shed load. Penguin can console themselves with that. I wouldn't imagine anyone will ever say, 'I'm not going to buy from Penguin 'cause they had that really shit Morrissey book'.
True. But they lost a lot of credibility over it, especially after it won the Bad Sex award. Personally, I'm not sure about sales. I would have bought it but the reviews were so universally terrible - and so comprehensive in explaining why it was so terrible - that I didn't feel like wasting my money, just to read more of what I'd already read. I'm sure I can't have been alone. The fact that the audio book got cancelled probably tells its own story.
 
True. But they lost a lot of credibility over it, especially after it won the Bad Sex award. Personally, I'm not sure about sales. I would have bought it but the reviews were so universally terrible - and so comprehensive in explaining why it was so terrible - that I didn't feel like wasting my money, just to read more of what I'd already read. I'm sure I can't have been alone. The fact that the audio book got cancelled probably tells its own story.

'Bad Sex Award' haha.

I bought it and it was obviously head spinningly bad after just a couple of page turns. It took me a couple of days to get my head around quite how much my brain had been mugged after reading five or six pages of it.
 
One of the saddest things I've ever seen was the way Damon laughed, dutifully indeed, when Morrissey started jumping for joy in the padded cell, I mean elevator, on Morrissey day. It should have been brief, but that's the thing with mental patients, they never know when to stop. And you can see the laughter slowwwly freeze on the employee's lips as he realizes Morrissey isn't going to stop, and that he's chained to an actual madman...Although hopefully not by holy matrimony... #freeDiesel

Oh, I think Morrissey writes his puns especially for drunk Mexican people. #foreignermoney . If he could, he'd mime them. #themdumbnonnativespeakers

Yes, that was really awkward moment, but if it was "performed" by young Moz, wearing some flowers in his pocket, then I doubt that someone would call him a madman. Time is the cruelest thing. Though, all this has nothing to do with the book.
 
Yes, that was really awkward moment, but if it was "performed" by young Moz, wearing some flowers in his pocket, then I doubt that someone would call him a madman. Time is the cruelest thing. Though, all this has nothing to do with the book.

There’s a lot f truth to this
 
The sex scenes got a lot of flack because they were unintentionally hilarious and anatomically impossible.

The otherwise central zone

I'm not over it. Otherwise central :lbf::lbf::lbf:
 
Indeed. If the editor had worked on just about any other book by a well-known writer, he or she would have almost definitely lost their job.
Come on. Both Morrissey, and the publisher knew that the release of the book in any form was based on name value alone, and the greater a train wreck it was, the more attention it might receive. Why not?

Morrissey is all about just shaking his tits at this point, and by his "tits" I mean his tongue.

No one involved in the project expected this to be anything other than an exotic prize for demented followers.
 
Come on. Both Morrissey, and the publisher knew that the release of the book in any form was based on name value alone, and the greater a train wreck it was, the more attention it might receive. Why not?

Morrissey is all about just shaking his tits at this point, and by his "tits" I mean his tongue.

No one involved in the project expected this to be anything other than an exotic prize for demented followers.
Well, to be fair, he does have the tits as well, should he want to shake them.
 
I was tempted to add "while inhaling coke", but since I work in publishing, that would be a pipe dream.
Oh, I don't know, there has to be some explanation :lbf: I worked in publishing in the 80s/early 90s and it certainly involved a lot of alcohol (although I was always told this was nothing compared to the 'golden era' of the 70s where people would regularly go to lunch and not return for the day). I never saw coke, although it wouldn't have been beyond the realms of possibility. Perhaps it's cleaned up its act these days? It probably needed to, to be fair. Although the idea does make me a little sad. All that uproarious fun, lost to productivity :rolleyes:
 

Trending Threads

Back
Top Bottom