From the book:
‘The reader may be disgusted by my behaviour and its rubric, and feel that I am defiling the mountain like a piece of grit in your eye. But I belong now in this place, I’m attached to it. The mountain dictates my behaviour as the soil does a worm’s. Can you understand that? What I’m doing here is valid and harmonious.’
Dennis Cooper has described New Juche as ‘one of the most inspiring, original and groundbreaking artists working today,’ and Mountainhead is arguably the elusive writer/photographer’s most accomplished work to date. Within the structure of a sexually charged exotic travelogue, we discover prose that is at once repulsive, lyrical, and deeply sensual; that is anchored by a raconteur’s instinct for gritty storytelling, yet punctuated by liminal flights of feverish imagination. Mountainhead deftly interlaces personal confession with an unsettling disquisition on pornography, photography, prostitution, the body, identity, and place. In its cascading momentum, readers are confronted by a vertiginous exposition of interpersonally fraught revelation and deception that remains implacably wedded to the thematic emblem of nature as moral alibi.
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Like Athena from the skull of Zeus, this is a fully-formed work, a confident work. Mountainhead will be an unexpected shot from a cannon and I feel it is destined to fall into the hands of readers looking to read a jungle extension of Bataille and Kosinski. Yet it is truly a singular work, sui generis, a giant black obelisk in the middle of nowhere. The entire time I was reading it, I was thinking: this is a fucked up secret and I wish I could share it with someone else
-James Nulick, author of Valencia
