THE LAZY BOYS
…and the only reasoning I can offer is that to fall is better than to stand still, and the dreams are bad but they are at least my own, but mostly that saying yes is easier than saying no, because in this world when you say yes no one ever asks you your reasons...
RICHEY SAUER, EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD, WHITE AND PRIVILEGED, drifts into Otago University. Tortured by a drunken incident he can’t remember involving a female student, he descends into a dizzying spiral of substance abuse, sex, bullying, and the violent slipstream of organized sport.
Set in Dunedin, a university town caught up in its own mythology that hides a world of sordid parties, private school cliques and institutionalized violence, THE LAZY BOYS presents a satirical vision of a generation unmoored from cultural nationalism, morality and prospects for the future—young men ripping away not only at the bonds of family and society, but themselves and everything that attracts them.
In this bold follow-up to his award-winning THE METHOD ACTORS, Carl Shuker delivers a harrowing narrative as harsh as LESS THAN ZERO and as brutal as A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.
Praise
"Disturbed and disturbing...Inertia builds through endless rounds of chaos. In the end he has no choice. He has no identity, he is possessed.... The logic is exact...The acuity of his observations skewers attention. There’s a calm about Richey, when he’s not jittery. His observations are beautifully rendered, whether lyrical, dramatic or phantasmagoric."
—Lumiére
"Shuker’s splatterpunk method has produced a contemporary equivalent of the great provincial novel: reading this scarifying story is akin to being in a rucking maul, one with the energy and intensity of the parochial world it so powerfully renders."
—Listener
"Carl Shuker’s THE LAZY BOYS is a powerful, deeply disturbing, unflinching, perhaps slightly exaggerated look at the ‘Dunedin lifestyle’....a frightening comment on student life; they call it a satire, but it’s hard to get the joke when you’re the butt end of it – and even if you do, it’s not very funny. I’d definitely say that my time was not wasted but all I could call this book is a thought-provoking horror story. Creepy. Awful. Morbid. A must-read."
—Critic
"Fans of the frightening, fist to the stomach violence and grit of AMERICAN PSYCHO and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE will enjoy the latest offering by New Zealand author Carl Shuker. Actually, ‘enjoy’ is entirely the wrong word… it’s not a pleasant read at all... Utterly depressing, yet completely compelling, I felt sick to my stomach the entire time I read this book yet couldn’t put the damn thing down."
—Girls' Day Out
"THE LAZY BOYS deserves a wide readership, especially among those interested in young people and the way they can, as Freud said of neurotics, 'escape into illness.'"
—PopMatters
Reviews and interviews
Pulp (pdf)
North and South (pdf)
Listener Best Book of 2006
NZ Herald feature (pdf)
Timaru Herald Profile (pdf)
The Rake's Progress interview, parts one, two and three
Critic, student magazine of Otago University, where THE LAZY BOYS is set
See thenews page for more stuff as it happens.
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From THE LAZY BOYS
The girl’s name was Skye. When we got to Hanging Rock we were on dirt roads in a big bad car, and with all the windows down it smelled of cowshit and smoke from the barbecues of old people at picnic tables who stared at us as we drove slowly past. We found a place where the river seemed deep and slow and the car was parked so the headlights shone out over where we chilled the dozen cans of Southern Draught in the shallows. We sat by the river listening to the Creedence repeating, repeating, drinking—me silently—until Matt was sick in the trees.
This older guy was a farmer’s son, and he told us a story kind of trying to impress the girl and probably us about how he and his older brother had to muster sheep on a paddock on their father’s farm that ended in a cliff. They were just young, but they separated one sheep from the rest and threw stones at it (he told us) until it had to fall off the cliff.
“It was awesome, man,” he said, kind of laughing, to show that it was alright, because he wasn’t quite sure. No one had really anything to say to this, because we weren’t sure if it was alright or not. “It was sweet as. It was old.”
And the river was so slow and deep and black it didn’t even look like it was moving at all, and we could hear one of the older guys back at the picnic tables was drunk and shouting, and later that night or it could have been a different night or even with my parents when we were younger, but I have connected these memories, and anyway, it doesn’t really matter, later we found the body of a sheep in the river. It was caught underwater and floating there and it was the only thing that made ripples. I would have thought Matt would have got excited but I don’t remember that; what I do remember is the sheep itself. It was floating on its side with its head leaned way back.
The reason it was the only thing that made ripples (for a weird, electrifying moment we, together, thought it was alive) was because it was being eaten by an eel. The eel had eaten into the sheep’s chest between its front legs and up inside its neck. It was making the sheep’s neck straighten like it was stretching, and the eel was kind of thrashing and causing the sheep to move, to nod and lean further back, to jiggle in the water like it was still just alive, to make the slow black river water ripple.
The sheep’s eyes were open and expressionless and sleepy-looking, and it nodded with its mouth open and it seemed to have too many stained teeth.
And I guess if you’re a farmer or you live in the country you get used to seeing things like that, but I am a city kid from half a city, and I remember the memory of a feeling that it was the same sheep the boy had killed with his brother, even though the boy’s farm was, I think, near Mount Horrible, and he had definitely told us that they killed it way back when they and we were young.