I can think of few filmmakers I'd be more interested in reading the debut novel of than David Cronenberg. The master of body horror and the modern psychological thriller has written a novel coming out on 2 September 2014. The book trailer is something else. It's a short film, really, and NSFW at that. Nothing gory happens, but there is nudity and dialogue suggesting the gore to come.
A woman sits in a back alley clinic, topless. She's waiting on multiple specialists to show up and help her. The first to arrive is the breast surgeon for some bizarre elective surgery. She was expecting the psychiatrist, but the physical transformation might as well begin first.
The book trailer for Consumed is a lot to take in. It is the single shot of the woman describing, essentially, the transformation of her body from a traditional human form to a vessel for insects. Naturally, it draws parallels to Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" or even Cronenberg's adaptation of The Fly.
But there's more. There's a pervasive sense of paranoia. The unidentified woman talks about people hearing them or being nearby. She knows people won't understand why she needs to do what she's doing. The doctor can't even wrap his brain around what she wants.
That is until he does agree to it. That's when it gets weird. The woman describes how to house the insects and he immediately gets the image "like a wasp's nest." It's a wonderfully strange turn at the last moments of the narrative.
The official book synopsis does nothing to help answer any of these questions, either. All it confirms is Cronenberg is doing Cronenberg the only way he knows how.
The exhilarating debut novel by iconic filmmaker David Cronenberg: the story of two journalists whose entanglement in a French philosopher's death becomes a surreal journey into global conspiracy.
Stylish and camera-obsessed, Naomi and Nathan thrive on the yellow journalism of the social-media age. They are lovers and competitors—nomadic freelancers in pursuit of sensation and depravity, encountering each other only in airport hotels and browser windows.
Naomi finds herself drawn to the headlines surrounding Célestine and Aristide Arosteguy, Marxist philosophers and sexual libertines. Célestine has been found dead and mutilated in her Paris apartment. Aristide has disappeared. Police suspect him of killing her and consuming parts of her body. With the help of an eccentric graduate student named Hervé Blomqvist, Naomi sets off in pursuit of Aristide. As she delves deeper into Célestine and Aristide's lives, disturbing details emerge about their sex life—which included trysts with Hervé and others. Can Naomi trust Hervé to help her?
Nathan, meanwhile, is in Budapest photographing the controversial work of an unlicensed surgeon named Zoltán Molnár, once sought by Interpol for organ trafficking. After sleeping with one of Molnár's patients, Nathan contracts a rare STD called Roiphe's. Nathan then travels to Toronto, determined to meet the man who discovered the syndrome. Dr. Barry Roiphe, Nathan learns, now studies his own adult daughter, whose bizarre behavior masks a devastating secret.
These parallel narratives become entwined in a gripping, dreamlike plot that involves geopolitics, 3-D printing, North Korea, the Cannes Film Festival, cancer, and, in an incredible number of varieties, sex. Consumed is an exuberant, provocative debut novel from one of the world's leading film directors.
That opening paragraph is overselling, for sure, but what high profile book doesn't use that kind of rhetoric? We know it's Cronenberg. We know he does weird. And you know for sure I can't wait for 2 September to come around.