The Dumb House

rumpelstiltskin

Has anyone ever read this book?
I remember i found it somewhere for 50p and it just sounded OK, so i got it and just recently i found it and read it.
It is such a great book, i read through American Psycho and that was just funny, but there are bits in this book that will genuinely freak you out.
Its basically about this psychopath (but a nice one) and he remembers stories his (psychopath) mother used to tell him about The Dumb House, which was some Eastern legend, where a guy raised a load of children in a totally isolated palace with dumb servants to discover whether language was learned or whether it was part of the soul...
Well, after collecting skulls for most of his childhood, the narrator begins experiments on his own newborn children.
I won't give too much away, but it really is a brilliant book, it's written beautifully, and every now and again you will stumble across something so weird that it will actually just make you sit up and think "what the ****!?" and read that passage again.
Unfortunately, I gave my copy to a friend cos i really wanted other people to read it; but i am pretty sure that the author was John Burnside.
So go get it if you think you can handle it.

Paladin

Sounds incredibly interesting. Might buy if i come across it