Boy Parts by Eliza Clark

Boy Parts by Eliza Clark.
Published 23rd July 2020 by Influx Press.
Read June 2020.

Irina likes to take photos, but these are not your normal selfies or holiday snaps.. oh no, these are highly explicit photographs and they are of the men she scouts when going about her normal business in Newcastle - average looking men, from the likes of the local Tesco, or passengers on the bus.

When an incident at work gets Irina an opportune break from life serving drinks in a dead-end bar, and the prospect of an exhibition of her work in a trendy London gallery is on the horizon, she gets the chance to revive her once promising career as an artist.

But rather than bringing the break Irina was looking for, musing over her collection of work for the exhibition sends her on an odyssey of self-destruction, all tied up with the strange relationship she has with her best friend and the shy young man from the local supermarket who has become her latest muse.

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What a deliciously dark and unexpected delight this book turned out to be. This is definitely not for the faint-hearted, but if you like your novels to grab you by the throat and take you down a K-hole (ok, I had to look up the meaning of this, because I am old, but it fits perfectly!) into the surreal, then you are in for an absolute treat.

When we first meet Irina, doing her thing in her beloved home-town of Newcastle, she seems stuck in a rut of drink and drugs, tied in an unhealthy love-hate relationship with her best friend, and constantly on the look out for her next photographic subject. She makes a decent, if sporadic, income from her special breed of photographs, and has some particularly dodgy sounding regular clients, but she is not really going anywhere.

When the prospect of a career changing exhibition drops in Irina's lap, it looks like things may finally be on the up...and she has found herself a new muse too, in the form of Eddie from Tesco - the shy young man who has also kindled some unexpected romantic feelings in Irina's heart.

But as Irina begins to go back though her stored collection of work, looking for appropriate material to exhibit, something happens to her already fragile psyche and she begins to shatter - much like the broken glass she always seems to be seeing out of the corner of her eye. And the reminiscences she shares along the way lead the reader to understand why, as they are often sad, bleak, sardonic and shocking.

As Irina goes into freefall, self-destruction is the order of the day, and her life comes to imitate the transgressive art that is her forte - raw, brutal and bizarre.

Irina is a complicated character. There are shades of Patrick Bateman here (Newcastle Psycho?) in terms of the double life she leads, and especially in her love of a business card, which was a stroke of genius. She is tough, glamorous and bold on the outside, which makes you admire her front, but inside she is more than a little broken, and ever so afraid of emotional intimacy - even though her work is of the most intimate kind. Her actions become more and more extreme in an attempt to call attention to the fact that she is disintegrating, but it seems impossible to break through the persona she has created and to make others see that she is in need of help. 

There is also a lot to take away from this about the ridiculous nature of the world of Art, especially the more avant garde side, which is rather interesting.

Boy Parts is one of the darkest romps I have read in recent years, but it is also full of pitch black humour, and uses social media and forms of communication beautifully. I absolutely loved it. This is impressive writing, that leads you away from the straight and narrow down a twisted path into the dark underbelly of life, and I am hungry for more from Eliza Clark!

Boy Parts is available in ebook, paperback and audio formats (read by the amazing Eliza Clark herself) from 23rd July 2020, so get ordering now - ideally, direct from Influx Press HERE.

Thank you to the superlative Jordan Taylor Jones and Influx Press for sending me a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

From the cover of the book:

Irina obsessively takes explicit photographs of the average-looking men she persuades to model for her, scouted from the streets of Newcastle. 

Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. 

The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina's relationship with her obsessive best-friend, and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention... 

BOY PARTS is the incendiary debut novel from Eliza Clark, a pitch-black comedy both shocking and hilarious, fearlessly exploring the taboo regions of sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century.

About the author:

Eliza Clark has relocated from her native Newcastle back to London, where she previously attended Chelsea College of Art. She works in social media marketing, recently having worked for women’s creative writing magazine Mslexia.

In 2018, she received a grant from New Writing North’s ‘Young Writers’ Talent Fund’. Clark’s short horror fiction has been published with Tales to Terrify, with an upcoming novelette from Gehenna and Hinnom expected this year. 

She hosts podcast You Just Don’t Get It, Do You? with her partner, where they discuss film and television which squanders its potential.