"Diary of an Oxygen Thief" author

So if this is a first hand account as its believed to be, then the Author is a horrible person and leaves little to be desired from reading.

But if you look at this as a fresh account into the mind of a Narcacist, then this book deserves to be read by everyone, to understand what signs to look out for and understand narcacism as a whole. Whoever wrote this book is so full of themselves it almost becomes astonishing to read, because he makes you want to hate him more and more with each turn show more of the page.

Which I believe may have been the intent for the book. show less

On the one hand it was completely underwritten,
thinly plotted wank. on the other it was pretty
clever and funny and kind of uniquely dread-
inducing. Weird one. Willing to recommend to
people who like Bret Easton Ellis or Dennis Cooper
or that kind of thing.

"I was in pain and wanted others to feel it too"
By sally tarbox on 18 September 2017
Format: Kindle Edition
Probably 3.5* for what is an astonishingly vivid, punchy and well-written novella. I don't know if the storyline's really enough to give it more.
The nameless narrator is an Irish advertising whizz kid, working in London. He's professionally successful. And an alcoholic. He deliberately provokes fights in pubs. Then he moves on to women: reeling them in then dumping them with some choice show more home-truths: "I enjoyed it so much. Not the sex or even the conquest, but the causing of pain."

He kicks the booze. He gets a well-paid job in the USA. He swears off women... and then he meets Aisling: "she looked just like the pictures of the Virgin Mary in Irish Catholic homes." But Aisling is no saint and our narrator is about to get his comeuppance.

Read in one sitting, it's quite a compulsive story. show less

I had a usual "entirely too long for sane readers" discussion about this book, alongside The Deep Whatsis by Peter Mattei over on OTC, which is where there "Eric Nye" in this discussion comes from. You can read the entirety of my verbose analysis over on OTC, but for now, here's a snippet:

The anti-hero of Diary of an Oxygen Thief is a drunken sociopath who works for a British advertising agency. He accepts a transfer to an American branch in the Midwest and finds himself besotted with a show more lovely woman who is as much a sociopath as he is. The unnamed protagonist eventually sobers up and feels some regret at the way he behaved but at the end his transformation isn’t as clear cut to me as others. In fact, the entirety of the book is itself an act of revenge against the woman who puts the protagonist in his place, which doesn’t speak to a real transformation.

The back blurb of this book makes it sound a lot more lively and derivative than it really is, referencing Holden Caulfield and Lolita ravaging each other in McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. That isn’t the case at all. The narrator isn’t an earnest but mentally unbalanced kid yearning for a world where he fits in. The woman who wrecks his shit isn’t a slip of a girl who engaged in an adolescent-twisted form of feminine wiles because she was a victim of paternal predation. And there is very little in this book that harks back to the cocaine-fueled New York of the 1980s. Really, it’s a dank tale of a miserable man who meets a terrible person and even when he sobers up and finds his past behavior upsetting, he’s still the miserable man at at his core. He is essentially the same person throughout the book – he just stops abusing substances that limit his capacity to control the roiling viciousness that fills his heart.

That is what makes this novel so compelling – that viciousness. He can’t stop it as along as he is drinking and he engages in it even as he knows he is being cruel, that his cruelty is destroying women he sometimes genuinely cares about, and that his cruelty is destroying him, too. It’s a far different and more complex impulse than the cruelty that drives Eric Nye. Eric is a shithead because he’s got money, youth and looks on his side and his impulses are easier to understand. I think everyone, while we cluck our tongues in disgust, can ultimately understand why people do despicable things when money is at play. The sheer perversity that fuels the protagonist in Diary of an Oxygen Thief is less clear to the average person.

It’s almost delicious, the perversity. Watching his cat-like desire to torment his prey is fascinating, all the more so because the women he debases, insults and humiliates only become aware that they are prey when he downshifts into his role as the torturer. Sometimes he races out of the gate with his metaphorical dick in his hand, ready to wave it in their faces, but other times he builds years-long relationships that he trashes for reasons that are not clear to him. But he does it anyway. It’s a compulsion that he can only keep tamped down when sober and as he destroys others he destroys himself.

And he’s a magnificent bastard throughout the entire book. It’s cringy but compelling. show less