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I Will Rot Without You Kindle Edition

by Danger Slater (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 104 ratings
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WHEN THE WORLD FALLS APART AND YOUR BODY STARTS TO ROT, LET THE ROACHES LEAD.

Meet Ernie. His life is a mess. Gretchen's gone, and the apartment they once shared in this grey, grim city is now overrun with intelligent mold and sinister bugs.

Then his neighbor Dee shows up, so smart and lovely. If he can just get past the fact that her jealous boyfriend could reach out of her blouse and punch him in the face at any moment, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

Unfortunately for all involved, a Great Storm is coming and it will wash away everything we've ever known about the human heart.

"I WILL ROT WITHOUT YOU is like Cronenberg's THE FLY if it had been directed by Frank Zappa and Bruce Bickford. Nightmarishly rich in vision, absurdly and painfully hilarious, sorrowfully poignant, and bristling with outrageous surprises that never ever ever stop coming till it's done." - John Skipp, from his introduction
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  1. Language
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  3. Publication date
    February 10, 2016
  4. File size
    361 KB
  5. Page Flip
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Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

WINNER OF THE WONDERLAND BOOK AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL
"A true masterpiece in Bizarro storytelling." - BENEATH THE UNDERGROUND

"Danger Slater is fearless. That much is obvious. But it's when you realize that he's also shameless about how he feels that you recognize you're in the hands of a mad-lover, a very funny-fiend, an artist...[I Will Rot Without You] is the kind of book that makes you want to write one of your own." - JOSH MALERMAN, author of Bird Box
"Like Casablanca if it were directed by Harmony Korine's cousin on a mescaline binge." -DIRGE MAGAZINE
"It's so much more than in-your-face splatterpunk, it truly defies description" - CEMETERY DANCE
"A complete upside-down, inside-out trip through the wringer, fascinating, impossible to walk away from or forget." - HORROR FICTION REVIEW
"At its core, I Will Rot Without You is an authentically human book about loss, identity, and the cost of moving on. It is also wonderfully gross." - SPLATTERPUNK ZINE
"I Will Rot Without You goes 200 miles per hour, in punchy bursts through Ernie's chaos, which is hilarious in places, devastating in others, and populated by a cast of insanely imaginative characters doing unimaginable things." - THESE WALKING BLUES
"If Richard Brautigan and William S. Burroughs had a baby, it would be Danger Slater." -THE NOVEL PURSUIT

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01BO6MD0I
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Fungasm Press (February 10, 2016)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 10, 2016
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 361 KB
  • Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 104 ratings

About the author

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Danger Slater

Danger Slater

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Danger Slater is the world's most flammable writer! He is the Wonderland Award winning author of I Will Rot Without You, Puppet Skin, and He Digs A Hole! He likes exclamation points! He is your favorite writer! You love him!

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
104 global ratings
I read this book then turned into a cockroach
5 Stars
I read this book then turned into a cockroach
review of “I will rot without you” by Danger Slateralmost a year ago i woke up and found an old call for reviews for a young authors new book, that young author is Danger Slater and the book is of course the one I’m reviewing here, “I will rot without you.” Then I drank some coffee and made my way to my job at the time, which involved dressing in drag as the statue of liberty, and I tried to dictate an e-mail to the author and explain a bunch of reasons why I should be given a free copy to read. Over the course of the next twelve months I did a lot of different things, none of which involved reading the book I was sent.Flash forward to a couple weeks ago and you find me finally reading this book and being taken in by it’s grotesque descriptions of a man being possessed by molds and fungi and cockroaches that communicate by running around his apartment and climbing inside of corpses and secret cockroach churches hidden deep in the walls. There’s also a broken love story between the main character, Ernie, and his ex-girlfriend Gretchen. Gretchen is also the name of one of my neighbors, but I’m pretty sure that is just a coincidence.At times I thought that there were simply too many adjectives and pronouns, everything seems to have an extreme description added on, and I could imagine english teachers of all stripes shaking their head at the manuscript, and I realized that joining them in head shaking is the last thing I would want to do, so I just ran with it. The extreme descriptions paint the work in ways that are surprising, like this excerpt “I’m tangled up in my coats. Jacket arms grope at me like the tentacles of a fabric jellyfish. I’m molested by winter wear.” Something there really struck me throughout the whole book, like how much this was real. Danger really had a girlfriend and they really broke up as so many boy and girl friends do. Not that this book was necessarily based on real events, as a lot of things that happen in the book seem like they couldn’t have really happened, but who knows right?What I’m trying to say is that this guy is writing from his heart, however many adjectives or adverbs or pronouns or whatever all those things are called, however many he uses there is still some sort of humanity and realness underneath it all. And that stuff is crazy, that is the stuff your friend calls you up when he’s sobbing on the floor because his life just fell apart, the stuff he tells you then, that stuff is in here.Also he has a podcast, but there’s a lot of salty language in it.
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Top reviews from the United States

Katherine J. Parker
5.0 out of 5 stars If you’re ready to feel uncomfortable in your own skin, then Slater's I Will Rot Without You should be on your reading list
Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2017
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What can I say about Slater’s I Will Rot Without You? To be honest, I could talk about the book all day- and I’m fairly certain I have. It was the first book of its kind I’ve ever made it more than a few pages into- and by “its kind” I don’t exactly mean it’s double genre classification of “bizarro” or “horror”. Let’s be clear, though. Danger’s book is strange—it’s also horrifying, gross, and heartfelt. The protagonist is a broken man who can’t seem to pull out of his spiral into madness and self-pity in the wake of the end of a toxic relationship- but the mold in his sink and the cockroaches climbing his walls and scurrying across his counters aren’t just a side effect of his apathetic approach to cleanliness brought on by the depressive stupor that claims his every waking moment…. They’re so much more.

Dangers story is vulgar with a purpose. Featuring body horror at the center of a host of other disturbing images and actions, Danger Slater’s work brings the internal ugliness of bad relationships to the external world—where they can’t be overlooked.

As for the matter of prose: Danger’s use of language is seductive and alluring, even when he’s writing about the most mundane of things. If it weren’t for his skill with words, I’d never have made it past the first roach squashing, but Danger tempers his gore with a vibrance you can’t just pry your eyes away from.

I would suggest this book to anyone with a strong stomach, and I’d lend my own copy to those with weaker stomachs who wanted to try it out. If you’re ready to feel uncomfortable in your own skin, then Danger Slaters I Will Rot Without You should be on your reading list.
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G.Anderson
4.0 out of 5 stars Dark, absurdist literature at its best
Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2016
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Let me think--how to put this…. Here goes: Danger Slater’s latest offering, I Will Rot Without You, grabs you by the boo-boo and doesn’t let go until the last bit of fetid flesh implodes into oblivion (sort of). Even by bizarro standards, this is a bizarre tale of love and betrayal--bizarre in the best sense, that is. I Will Rot Without You conjures metaphysical images that must certainly have Donne (yes, the John Donne) rolling in his grave. These are conceits that the mind almost refuses to concede, synaptic leaps that the brain is loath to make. Yet when it does, the effect is a kind of cognitive inebriation that leaves one wanting more.

Within an absurdist framework, Slater probes and prods familiar themes of love and longing between protagonist Ernie Cotard, ex-girlfriend Gretchen, and girl-next-door Dee. But the author turns these themes on their collective head by rendering the figurative literal, quite literal, actually. Themes like lover as possession turns morbidly creepy when Dee’s abusive boyfriend, Cutter, literally, that is physically, possess her, the object of his obsession (you’ll have to read the book to find out exactly how he manages that particular feat). Similarly, the theme of love gone bad is taken to its logical and very literal end, as the title of the novel suggests, when Ernie heads corpse-ward in a big way after his faltering relationship with Dee turns toxic and leeches the life from him. In this way, Ernie Cotard is less like Cronenberg’s Seth Brundle (or Langelaan’s François Delambre) and more like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, whose growing sense of alienation and otherness in modern society manifests itself as a physical metamorphosis. The point is these are tried-and-true themes, but it’s doubtful that readers have ever encountered them in quite this context before.

There can be no doubt that Slater spins a lively tale in this novel. The story moves quickly from beginning to end, twisting and turning, or perhaps more accurately, writhing and gnashing, only momentarily coming up for air with brief--almost ethereal--moments of contemplation. Take, for example, this little gem:

Black like pen ink. Like the fur of a bad luck cat. Black like the water at the bottom of the Ganges. I am adrift in the tide of this black dream. And I wonder if I were to shrink down so that I were the smallest thing in the universe, what color would the space between electrons be? Is emptiness black? Can you touch it? Does emptiness even exist at all, or does the black-ink cat-fur deep-river water of our subjective experiences rush in to fill up the gap.

Which leads me to the one complaint I have about the novel: I wish there were a few more moments like this one. A bit more time to breathe. It’s a small critique, true enough. Oh, and there are several strands of the plot that seem to fall out of the weave and are never quite gathered back in. But these are small issues in the larger story. And this story is much larger that its page count would suggest. It’s as big as the universe that exists between the space of electrons. Yep, a conundrum--but one that seems to work, just like I Will Rot Without You works--very well, in my estimation. You can thank Danger Slater for that.
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Erika Instead
5.0 out of 5 stars Love is the Harbinger of Untold Disaster
Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2016
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Ernie's girlfriend left him and now he's literally falling apart in increasingly gruesome ways. His inability to let go and move forward with his life is at the core of this story. Heartbreak...feeling lost...these are things that most people can relate to. It's this relatability mixed with the bizarre visuals, dark humor, and beautiful word choices that make this tale unique and endearing.

Some things I love about I WILL ROT WITHOUT YOU...

1. Body Horror: This is my favorite subgenre in fiction! Ernie's body is decaying in absolutely terrifying ways. The descriptions are revolting and the fairly relaxed way the characters handle it is amusing. And then there's his neighbor, Dee, whose boyfriend is amputating parts of his own body and sewing them onto hers!

2. Language: The author has a talent for description and you can tell that every word is carefully and lovingly chosen. Some of my favorite lines:

"I reach over and take a sip, the techno-flavors of industrial runoff dance on my taste buds like teenagers in love."

"Adrenaline fills my blood with exhaust as it rockets through my veins."

"The fear is written in cursive upon his unkempt eyebrows."

3. The Filth: The roaches. The mold. The garbage. The stench. Ernie's world is disgusting and I love it.

5. Cockroaches and Fungus: Some of the scenes with the army of roaches and the quivering bathroom mold were so vivid and weird, I could easily see them in a stop-motion short film.

4. Corpse Marionette: CORPSE MARIONETTE! If those two words don't sell you on this, I give up.

So my advice is to curl up on your slutty couch and dig into a copy of I WILL ROT WITHOUT YOU!
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Top reviews from other countries

Thomas Joyce
5.0 out of 5 stars Probably the weirdest, most f***ed up, beautiful book about love I've ever read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 2, 2024
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Probably the weirdest, most f***ed up, beautiful book about love I've ever read. The prose can seemingly switch from gross descriptions of bizarro body horror to the most eloquent declarations of love and loss in an instant, and I have no idea how Slater makes it so seamless. The internal voice of the protagonist is fluid and, reading his internal thoughts, I felt as though I were reading it in my own voice. As though I were Ernie. That probably sounds messed up, but I only mean it as a compliment to Slater's incredible ability to convey his main character in a way that I sympathised with, empathised with, and FELT for Ernie. The mold, the roaches, the storm, they all seem so crazy on their own. But when Slater combines them to help tell the heartbreaking story of Ernie's loneliness, and the uplifting nature of the story toward the end, I can't help but be impressed. Wonderful work.
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Bloke From Street
5.0 out of 5 stars A tale of loss, love, cockroaches and mould
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 3, 2016
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With a name like Danger Slater, if your writing sucks, then you're in trouble. However, reading through I Will Rot Without You, I'm convinced that he is worthy of it. A tale of loss, love, cockroaches and mould, when the narrator struggles to deal with his recent break up, and in particular living in the same flat where they had lived together, a seemingly innocuous infestation of bugs heralds a redemption, of sorts. If you're familiar with bizarro, then you're well aware of the strange journey you are usually taken on, and this book is no exception, what is different is how even with the madness going on, you're still pulled in to the story. Everyone has had their heart broken, and I Will Rot Without You takes a very different look at this, and shows that, irrespective of who you are, you still need to let go, to move on. Even if that does mean surviving a super storm, and a myriad of things I don't want to spoil. Best pick it up yourself and have a butchers.
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Jade
5.0 out of 5 stars A new favourite
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 30, 2017
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A book that only gets stranger as you read on, but one that does it in such a way that it has become one of my favourite books of all time.
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