The Desert Places Paperback – November 26, 2013

First, I was surprised that it is small book that will fit into your back pocket. But, I really learned to like it as I wanted to re-read a few sections. Second, I got this to see more of Matt Kish's artwork as he did on Heart of Darkness. Lastly, Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss's writing is dark, descriptive, and at times repetitive but only when the point is being driven home... and it gets driven. To properly review the book I would need to give away too much of what makes the story great. It is the story of... mankind? Us? Who/Why we are and why we do what we do? It's passages can be gripping, haunting and very dark when you read it. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and have read it through a few times now (it's short) but it is not for everyone as its story is a dark one bordering on depressing and the artwork - I would have liked more - enhances the dark writing.

I read this for a Fiction Workshop class. While the writing itself is good, I did not enjoy it. To me, it was dark for the sake of being dark, and dealt with the subject and personification of evil in surprisingly predictable way. The authors themselves are very nice people (we Skyped with them), but their book dragged on for me as it lacked plot and for the most part, character. It dragged on and on.Others liked it, but for me, if it had not been assigned, I would have not finished it.Also, this is a very small book, and while it is a nicely bound and printed copy, it seems overpriced.

Heroes and villains are absent even though the textual provocations are epic. The prose is lyrically bestial, crimes of harmonic diction by Sparks and Kloss channeled into elegiac carnage. Matt Kish’s illustrations are the disturbingly visceral guts that bind the book together, a chaotic nightmare of floating organs, deathly spheres, and skinless personas haunted by the skeletal visage of cruelty. They’re not for the meek of heart, but serve as a stark reminder of the butchery people have been inflicting on each other since, well, forever.

It's hard to describe one's reaction to this tiny book without the use of curse words. Nifty, beautiful, creepy collaboration.

A truly interesting look at mankind's beginning and development, a manifesto of sorts, with unsettling drawings and thoughtful ideas. A small book of wonder, not without some anger behind it. Does this make any sense? Somehow, yes.

Hated it, to dark.

Wonderfully gory illustrations paired with cryptic, proto-biblical writing of the highest caliber. The author/artists make reference to Cormac McCarthy in that this is somewhat of an homage to his work, but in my opinion, this writing surpasses it in a pure, spiritual-bloodbath sort of a way. Part Book-of-Genesis, Part Memoir of a Monster, this is the kind of book that truly inherits the Body Horror crown that contemporary fiction has left behind in favor of more evasive plot lines. Somewhere out there, the stiff neck bones of Lovecraft's dusty, putrid skeleton are cracking, shooting out dust from its crevices, in a reserved nod of approval.

This is a small, highly designed, gorgeous pocket book containing color illustrations by the amazing Matt Kish (Moby Dick in Pictures). It's a hybrid text by two of today's rising literary stars, Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss. The hybrid text is part prose, part hymnal, part poetry, and in a short amount of pages paints devestating, haunting images while observing the history of evil in our world. A must read.