Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness - Softcover

Bottoms, Greg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226067645 ISBN 13: 9780226067643

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

A taut, powerful memoir of madness, Angelhead documents the violent, drug-addled descent of the author's brother, Michael, into schizophrenia. Beginning with Michael's first psychotic break—seeing God in his suburban bedroom window while high on LSD—Greg Bottoms recounts, in gripping, dramatic prose, the bizarre disappearances, suicide attempts, and the shocking crime that land Michael in the psychiatric wing of a maximum security prison. A work of nonfiction with the form and imagery of a novel, Angelhead enables the reader to witness not only the fragmenting of a mind, but of a family as well.

"A tour-de-force memoir. . . . Bottoms writes like a poet, he writes like he is on fire."—Esquire, Book of the Year, 2000

"Angelhead is a brilliant, albeit inconceivably sad book. The fact that Bottoms survived the ordeal is incredible. But the fact that he could write about it with such pathos and insight is nothing less than extraordinary."—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Greg Bottoms has provided a biographical novel about his brother that may be as close as most of us will ever get to knowing what it is to be truly mad. Angelhead is a story nearly as terrifying as the disease it describes."—Psychology Today

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Greg Bottoms is assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont. He has published stories and essays in Alaska Quarterly Review, Creative Nonfiction, Nerve, and Salon.

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In pitch-perfect prose, Greg Bottoms shows with great empathy and dramatic tension the psychological decline of his brother as he becomes obsessed first with heavy metal music, martial arts, and the occult, and then with the more bizarre aspects of Christianity. We see not only the effect Michael's odd and increasingly violent behavior has on the people around him, but also come to understand how the author, now a successful writer and journalist, used the power of language and storytelling both to save himself and to forgive his brother.

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Excerpt

Michael's plan was simple. He was going to burn our father alive before thedemons completely overtook his soul. He believed our father would kill ourmother by strangling her one night in bed; he had seen this in a vision given tohim in a dream by a mysterious force named Utok the Angel, who didn't have abody but was instead pure energy and translucent, a wave of colorless movementspeeding about in his room.

The same angel, in a different dream, told Michael that the bug in his head, atiny metal transistor, had been planted by his father and was to keep Michaelfrom interfering, to always know his whereabouts in the house. His father wasthe origin of all the voices. His father had made Michael a prisoner. Michaelhad finally been given full disclosure from the other world, the real world ofdreams. All the tricks, all the lies, all the pain he had suffered andnightmares he had endured, were radiating from the center of his father's head.The whole cancer thing was an obvious ploy, more tricks, a way of gettingMichael to drop his defenses in what had become a silent war.

Kill that motherfucker, Utok had said. It's the only way.

His father was flooding the world with demons, so no matter where Michael went,the forces of evil could squeeze through window frames and up through vents andalong corridors, always shadowing him, always oppressing him. His fathercontrolled the sewer systems and the radio towers and the satellite dishes inspace. He controlled the demons and the demons controlled the world and thatmade our dying father the true nemesis of God, the Antichrist. That had been themessage in the window when he was fourteen, only he hadn't known enoughscripture then to read it correctly. The demons would always find Michael aslong as his father was alive, acting sick, acting innocent, scootingaround in his underwear with that ridiculous chemo tube stuck in his side.

Michael waited in the garage, smoking?he had to smoke in the garage now thathis father was dying of lung cancer; further reason to hate him?until 4:30 A.M.He had set an alarm on a small digital clock that sat on a work-bench. Then heput out his cigarette and began to pray. The voices were becoming clear; butsoon, if it all worked out, they would vanish forever with his father; vanishinto oblivion with all evil. There would be light, a new world. Blessed arethey that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, andmay enter in through the gates into the city. For without are dogs, andsorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever lovethand maketh a lie.

First he went upstairs, to my younger brother's room, which was locked. Helifted the smoke alarm off the small hook on the wall and put it in his coatpocket. On the stairs, coming down, he tried to be quiet, but some of the boardssqueaked under his weight. My father heard him, but his stalking was normal. Myfather wheezed at night, couldn't sleep in certain positions because of thefluid that stayed in his lungs. He ignored the noise.

Michael went to the hall adjacent the living room. The smoke detector therewouldn't pop off the wall like the one upstairs, so he twisted the white coveruntil it broke off, then ripped the wires out, putting it all in his pocket. Hetook both detectors and threw one in the kitchen trash can and one in thebathroom trash can.

Now he went back to the garage. The good voices, the ones from God, were tellinghim what to do. The bad voices, those radiating from my dying father's head,were trying to trick him into stopping now while he still could, before anyonewas hurt, before anyone was dead. They were saying bullshit things like hisfamily loved him and that what was wrong was wrong with him. He knew hewas right. The message was through an angel, from God himself. He wouldn't betricked, not this time. He knew what he had to do, knew he had to kill hisfamily to be free and to set them free. To murder was to free the soul from itscage, from pain and hopelessness, a noble, godly deed. In his mind he was doingmy family a favor. They would never be lonely or afraid or worried again. Theywould never fight or yell or cry or sit quietly and gloomily in that somberhouse. They would know only love and God's grace and forgiveness. They would goto heaven, maybe even my father, too, if God found it in his heart to forgivehim. They would lose their bodies and live forever.

Picking up the gas can, he headed back into the house. It was now ten afterfive. At the bottom of the stairs, in front of my parents' room, he poured apool of gasoline on the floor. He held the can close to the ground to quiet thesplash. He lit a wooden match on his zipper, tossed it into the pool ofgasoline, and watched the rising breath of flames. Heat radiated in concentriccircles past him. He waited a few seconds to make sure it closed off the doorwayin fire, then headed back to the garage.

In the garage he dumped the rest of the gasoline around, splashing it on thefloor and up over his shoes, over sporting equipment and gardening tools andcoolers and fold-up lawn chairs. Putting his cigarettes in his pocket and makingsure he had more matches, he got my mother's old bike, a blue three-speed fromSears with a baby seat. He opened the big garage door, lit another match on hiszipper, and tossed it into the gas. The entire garage, because of the open doorand the slight breeze, went up in an inferno instantly, lighting up the night awhite-yellow.

Michael rode off into the dark morning, with his clock radio and Bible in thebaby seat of the bike, his orange cigarette ember a single point of light alongthe road away from the house.

He felt better already. It had been the right thing to do, the only thing to do.He had left the gas can, with his fingerprints all over it, tipped over in thedriveway, the burned matches on the hardwood floor, smoke detectors covered inmore fingerprints in trashcans in the house, wires and batteries from the alarmsin the pockets of his coat. He went to the end of our road, about a mile away,and sat at the edge of the black river, where wooden fishing boats were tied topilings, floating on their own dark reflections He prayed, pulling hard on histhird, then his fourth cigarette He waited for the blue souls of my family to goflying past, toward the safe, bright stars.

Continues...

Excerpted from Angelheadby Greg Bottoms Copyright © 2005 by Greg Bottoms. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Copyright © 2005 Greg Bottoms
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226067645
• ISBN 13: 9780226067643
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 226
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: The University of Chicago Press; https://press.uchicago.edu/index.html; ; 5801 S. Ellis Avenue; Chicago; IL; 60637; USA
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