War Porn

Pornography is usually synonymous with smut, filth and vice; certainly, that definition has increasingly broadened to encompass war efforts. The image of the heroic solider fighting purposefully for a noble cause has been superseded by traumatized young men who are forced to endure repeated tours of......more

3 stars Author/ex-GI Roy Scranton really must have cojones of steel to take his solidly written take on the Iraq War and plant a ginormous IED for the reader to detonate (with but a few pages to spare) to all but destroy the preceding 350+ pages. Gutsy move (to give an unsympathetic perspective of t......more

In this lucid, disturbing, subversive, and powerful work, Roy Scranton, an author I had never heard of before, has made it to my top shelf of contemporary American writers. He’s got the nature of Denis Johnson—the attitude and sensibilities, but with his own handcrafted lingual charisma, a book that......more

This is an adolescent novel. More than fifty years ago, Leslie Fiedler argued that American literature was essentially adolescent, obsessed with escape, uninterested in dealing straightforwardly with sex and death. The thesis applies exactly to this book. In "War Porn." Roy Scranton wants to deal with......more

As a veteran of the Iraq War, I laud Roy Scranton's War Porn. Finally, an ambitious book from the pen of an ex-enlisted grunt that actually dares to engage the polemical -- and does so with searing artistic depth. The book, in theme and title, is very similar to the one I'm working on (on and off th......more