Mutilation Song

Thomas hears voices, and the worst of these voices belongs to a demon called Dinn. In a series of increasingly horrific rants, the demon re-frames Thomas’s declining mental health as a part of a secret training program, an occult procedure designed to cultivate the demons of tomorrow.In the distorted world depicted by Dinn, gateways to hell lie behind every door. Friends and family are the enemy. And the only way for Thomas to survive his training is to dedicate himself to the demon’s prescribed rituals of loneliness, ill health, and pain.Equal parts ferocious and seductive, Mutilation Song is a boundary-shattering horror novel that uses a hallucinatory narrator to explore the extremes of mental illness.

Nikola Delescluse, Paludes, Radio Campus Lille

“Dinn’s powers are immense, and when he enumerates them in the ear of Thomas, his ‘apprentice demon,’ the most blasé of readers cannot repress a shiver. . . . Jason Hrivnak, who, with The Plight House, made a masterful entry into the literature of malaise, now gives us this new Song added to hell, this poetical call to damnation.” ―Alain Nicolas, L’Humanité"The almost clinical language in which these hallucinatory states are described . . . at the same time holds a subterranean current . . . the idea that there is, despite all, a space of purity, or in any case incorruptibility, of the human soul. It’s this delicate seed that the demon aims to suppress, to annihilate, to reduce utterly to ashes. And that, yet, is omnipresent.”

Nicolas Winter, Just a Word

“A new trap, this is what Jason Hrivnak proposes in Mutilation Song. . . . A fabulous nightmare of hypnotic logorrhea, strewn with visions worthy of a Clive Barker on acid.”

La viduité

“Dazzling and suffocating, this violent plunge into the demonism of schizophrenia opens an entire world-in-a-book, a labyrinth of shifting voices, of truths to be deciphered. . . . A truly great novel.”

Hugues Robert, Librairie Charybde

“Profoundly disturbing and resolutely magnificent.”

Tony Burgess, author of Pontypool Changes Everything and People Live Still in Cashtown Corners

“Jason Hrivnak’s Mutilation Song is without question a poison but it is also a kind of scripture. This steady incantation of depravity and suffering will not make you a better person but it will, if you find yourself within ten feet of it, entice you to despise all life in an exquisite and elaborate way. . . . You’re gonna love this one.”

Brian Evenson, author of Last Days

“Reading like the occult love child of Georges Bataille and David Lynch, Hrivnak’s Mutilation Song is an unnerving and surreal meditation on the demons that haunt us and on the nature(s) of evil. Compelling and unsettling, and definitely worth the read.”

Bracken MacLeod, author of Come to Dust and 13 Views of the Suicide Woods

“Lyrical and hallucinatory, Jason Hrivnak’s Mutilation Song is a sensual atrocity, like The Screwtape Letters for demonomaniacs. Imagine the unholy daisy-chain of C.S. Lewis, J.G. Ballard, and Bret Easton Ellis and you have Mutilation Song.”

Lynn Crosbie, author of Where Did You Sleep Last Night?

“First Rule of The Plight House: everyone talk about The Plight House. Hrivnak writes like a crazy angel in this addictive, astonishing debut.”

About the Author

Jason Hrivnak was born and raised in Toronto. His first novel The Plight House was published in Canada in 2009, and had since been published in France. Mutilation Song is his second novel.

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