Bed

Winning the 2010 To Hell With Prizes First Novel Award and being picked up by Canongate isn’t bad for a novel that lay in David Whitehouse’s agent’s drawer of ‘destined for the big time’ manuscripts.

And now it’s out, what do we make of Bed. It’s a grotesquely funny, arch and morbid tale of two brothers, one second-best and the other spoilt and lazy. The spoilt lazy one hasn’t left his bed in over twenty years. We’re treated to some pretty disgusting descriptions of what happens to an immobile body as it rots in its own filth, doted on by its mother, and how this becomes Mal (the lazy one)’s unique ticket to fame… doing nothing.

Whitehouse has an eye for the one-liner, for the particularly gruesome turn of phrase and for comedy that is both unspoken, physical and witty.

Whether it’s a diatribe on our celebrity-mediocrity culture, our body-obsessed shock documentaries on Channel 4 (The Man Who Ate His Foot et al) or just a book about sibling rivalry, that is both tender and tense, unspoken and unending. Either way, Bed is a cunningly layered tale about all the things that make us grotesque human beings and how people love us for it.