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At a glance
- Condition
- New
- Dimensions
- 5.67 x 1.06 x 9.17 in
- Weight
- 14.3 oz
- Publisher
- Simon & Schuster Ltd
- Publication date
- June 6, 2024
- Language
- English
- Print length
- 336 pages
Description
From a provocative new literary talent, a hilarious and haunted novel featuring an unlikable protagonist grappling with grief, inheritance, and the ghosts of his past We meet our ill-tempered protagonist—the story’s titular “brat”—at a low moment, but not yet at rock bottom. The Gabriel of the novel is mourning the death of his father as well as a recent breakup, and struggling to finish writing his second book. Alone and aimless, he agrees to move back into his parents’ house to clear it out for sale. Here, the clichés end. Gabriel has trouble delivering on his as the moldy, overgrown house deteriorates around him, so does his own health, and large sheets of his skin begin to peel from his body at a terrifying rate. In fragments and figments, Gabriel takes us on a surreal journey into the mysteries of the family home, where he finds unfinished manuscripts written by his parents which seem to mutate every time he picks them up, and a bizarre home video that hints at long-buried secrets. Strange people and figures emerge—perhaps directly from the novel’s embedded fictions—and despite his compromised state (and his more successful brother’s growing frustration) Gabriel is determined to try to make sense of these hauntings. Part ghost story, part grief story; flirting with the autofictional mode while sitting squarely in the tradition of the gothic, Brat crackles with deadpan humor and delightfully taut prose. Smith’s arrival heralds the next generation of fiction writers—formally inventive, influenced by the rhythms of the internet, and infused with a particularly Gen Z sense of alienation. Irreverent and boundary-pushing, but not for its own sake, the novel that follows is muscular yet lyrical, riddled with paradox, and told with a truly rare and compelling clarity of voice. Brat is a serious debut that refuses to take itself too seriously. Read more
Specs 8
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster Ltd |
|---|---|
| Publication date | June 6, 2024 |
| Language | English |
| Print length | 336 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 1398525316 |
| ISBN-13 | 13 |
| Item Weight | 14.3 ounces |
| Dimensions | 5.67 x 1.06 x 9.17 inches |
No specs match.
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Top Amazon Reviews
Absurd, Scary, Fun
I knew I would love this when I first heard about it, and I did. I was graciously loaned an ebook by the publisher via NetGalley, and I tore through it. Fair warning that there's some mildly graphic body horror, but I adored the tone, the sense of humor, and the straight up weird bits. The format was refreshing; it read like a depressive dirtball diary from a man grieving his father's loss in unorthodox ways. For one reason or another, it's interspersed with punchy short stories and bits of manuscripts and screenplays. A bit scary, a bit mysterious, a bit meta. I found it to be a whole lot of fun. Would definitely revisit!
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Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2024 by Mihco McKinney
Strange, Interesting, and Definitely Worth the Read
This book...was a series of mind games from the first chapter to the very last page. I still don't understand, 100%, what I read - even two weeks after I finished the book. Was it a good read? Yes. Was it confusing? Yes. Did I enjoy the entire book, from beginning to end? Yes. Did this book piss me off? Also yes. But something about it just kept me reading, and I couldn't put it down. I didn't read the whole thing in one sitting, but it was pretty close - there was just something different offered here. It handled a lot of heavy themes, mostly grief and mental illness. The way it handled grief was not only frightening and dark, but the narrator did a great job of keeping things light at times when I'm pretty sure I would have been losing it. “When someone dies, it becomes a competition to be in charge of the history of that person. People want their memory to be the real one.” Gabriel, our narrator, has just gotten word that he lost his father. Gabriel's brother invites him to stay in their father's home and begin cleaning it out, and while he has every intention of doing so, he just...doesn't. Things begin to happen. First, his skin starts falling off. Then he stumbles upon his mother's manuscript for a book she was writing. This, albeit not very odd in itself, seems to change from time to time when Gabriel reads it. Events that happen in the story are different each time he reads through it, leading to an obvious fear and confusion. When he confronts his mother, who is in a care home, about the manuscript, she is confused. Then he meets a young boy and a young girl who are stealing a car and running away - and there is something about the young boy and girl that remind him of someone, maybe even some time ago. But no one else seems to see the boy or girl or realize that they are there. Finally, Gabriel finds a video tape while going through his father's things, and it's odd as well - not to mention the stories his father were writing before he died. Every time he read the stories or viewed the tape, things would change - and no one else could see this. Meanwhile, Gabriel's skin is just falling off over and over, with new skin appearing underneath - like a snake. It is confusing and while he seeks medical attention at first, he wonders if it is indeed helping, or if it just...isn't something that can be treated. Not to mention that the more that Gabriel's skin peels off, the more the house itself changes... Brat deals with grief. A lot of grief. And it deals with it in a way that might be difficult to understand, but in a way that is not entirely unfamiliar to those who have also come face-to-face with it. It's a book that isn't afraid to go there - to explore how grief can have an impact on mental health, and how it can often make you feel as though you are losing your grip on reality. The characters in Brat were definitely interesting. While I liked the main character, Gabriel, I don't feel that we had enough interaction with Gabriel's brother to really form that much of an opinion of him. Gabriel's brother's wife, on the other hand, was a character that, for me, was utterly unlikable. I'm not sure what it was about her, but her overall attitude and demeanor was just something I could have gone without in the book. The character development with Gabriel was interesting to watch, although I didn't feel there was as much of it as I had hoped there would be. I really loved the whole book-within-a-book feeling that the short stories written by Gabriel's father and the manuscript by his mother offered. They were definitely a nice touch to the book, especially when they kept changing each time he read them. I love reading things like that, things that feel almost haunted on their own. Brat is the kind of book that stays with you even after you've finished reading, because there's so much that you try to keep reading into and understand that you have to process it. It's a good book, and it definitely has its highs and lows, but overall, I would definitely enjoy reading through this one again.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2024 by Kelly Gunderman
This is something great
My reading this book is worth the time reading a lot of it.
Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2025 by Californians
Death by Said
I love unlikeable narrators. In fact they’re my favorite type of narrators. I also love books featuring severally dysfunctional familial relationships. So when I read the synopsis of this book—as well as some of the blurbs floating around--I was incredibly excited. I thought this might surely become one of my favorite books of 2024. I thought it would be depraved and experimental, complex in its simplicity, a mutation of the old cliches. It isn’t any of that. It’s an interesting concept but I wanted more depravity, since it’s main marketing point, the very title even, is centered around us not liking the narrator and, really, I think that’s the main thing Smith focused on. On trying to get us to not like him, never mind building and fulfilling a plot. That isn’t to suggest every book has to have some grand and complex plot—a character’s life often makes for a very compelling plot on its on—but someone we don’t even get that here. Also, I think it would be incredibly interesting to run a corpus analysis on this book to find out how many times Smith uses the word “said.” I understand that sometimes overuse of a word is intentional and can create both mood and tone—particularly a dry staccato one, which is often fun to read—but if that was Smith’s intention here he missed if for me. And it’s not even about finding synonyms for said (as that’s often another kind of exhaustion in books) but, rather, there are so many instances when any version of “said” is unnecessary, when there is no risk of reader confusion and, what’s more, when no supplemental information is tacked on. (I.e. it’s usually not “I said, peering up at him in annoyance.” It’s just “I said.” Full stop. Again and again.) I don’t know, maybe I went in with too much hope, too many expectations based on my perception of the synopsis. Either way, 2.5 stars.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2024 by avery
Very good
Had me from the first page. One of the most creative contemporary novels I've read in years. Thank you Gabriel, this was.......really fun.
Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2024 by Alex
Thought provoking strangeness
Do you want a lovable main character you can root for? I’m so sorry, then. This book is not for you. Brat by Gabriel Smith was like an accident scene and I, unexpectedly, was a rubbernecker. The story is intoxicating (or maybe the author was intoxicated when he wrote it. I am not sure.) It was one of the most bizarre tales I’ve ever encountered, and I have consumed many unusual books. I love when a narrative doesn’t follow a prescribed formula, and Brat was, undoubtedly, its own original thing. The main character, like the author, is named Gabriel, and he is, as you may have guessed, a bit of a brat. Gabriel is going through some stuff, though. Some weird, sad, and gross stuff. He is trying to come to terms with his father’s death and his mother’s dementia. He is in denial about his recent breakup. And now, on top of everything else he is forced to let go of, he is expected to pack up his childhood home so his older brother can put it on the market. So, while it is true that Gabriel isn’t the most likable character, he is a sympathetic one. The story curves into a fantastical horror, ultimately gaslighting the reader alongside the narrator. It all allows Gabriel to cling tightly to the one thing he still has a loose grip upon: that house. Gabriel finds himself crumbling within it, just as the walls rot around him. Every book needs to find the right audience. The offbeat nature of Brat means it is best suited for a very particular group of people. It’s thought provoking because it is so ambiguous, but if you prefer a less obscure narrative, this one isn’t going to work for you. I think the perfect reader for Brat also needs to be a little bit weird. I loved it. I am immensely grateful to Penguin Press and NetGalley for my copy. All opinions are my own. Update: Since finishing this, I keep thinking about it. I think it would be a really interesting book to discuss in a book club. I’m considering it as a pitch for the club I’m in. I think they’re relatively open to strange fiction, but I’m not sure if this will be a bit too strange, haha. Anyway, I do think, because of the ambiguity, that people will have varied interpretations of the text and I’d love to get other perspectives on it. My main takeaway was that grief distorts our reality. It affects our lens. As we work through the process, our perception continues to change. The way we saw something initially has suddenly been altered. It also made me think about the way we perceive our parents. As children, we have a rather superficial view of them, rarely seeing them as human beings with lives apart from us. Some carry this into adulthood, which I think was largely true for Gabriel. Perhaps something (like a death) begins to chip away at the surface, and we finally see that they were more than just our parents, but it’s complex and confusing, and if you’re inundated with countless revelations that force you to reevaluate your perspective, it can be overwhelming and anxiety inducing. Sometimes we want to cling to a certain image of our parents, and it’s difficult to accept that there is more beyond the edges of our imagination.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2024 by Cynthia S.
A very different kind of book - and it's a debut
This is a strange book for sure. The whole time I was reading I felt a little creepy, like I was in another reality. The theme is grief and dealing with the aftermath, as well as the house and its contents. With the father dead and the mother in a nursing home, the house is left to the two sons. One is married so Gabriel goes to live in the house and pack it up so they can sell it. But through a haze of alcohol and drugs and grief he cannot seem to do anything at all. He seems to spend a lot of time taking care of his father's marijuana plants in the attic (and sampling the stash). Gabriel's skin is shedding like a reptile - it just peels off. A little horror throughout with the skin peeling in sheets, plants overtaking the house and coming inside, all provide a horror-type feel. The Mother was a writer and Gabriel found a novel but every time he picks it up the story changes. It's a very different kind of book and it's a debut novel. I would recommend it to anyone who likes quirky and off-beat. Thanks to Penguin Press through Netgalley for an advance copy.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2024 by JudyD
Not for me
For me, this book ultimately didn't go anywhere. Maybe it was going to be horror, but nothing horrible happened. Maybe it was going to be about family, and sort of it was but they don't become closer or more estranged. Maybe it's about writing, (this by far the most) but there are certainly no breakthroughs. It's a quick read though I'm not really sure why I bothered to finish it. I think I was believing the ending would tie it all together. That didn't happen for me.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2024 by Plyle