Larissa Lai was very nice to write a blurb for the back of my book, Anderson. I love her work. Her novels When Fox is a Thousand and Salt Fish Girl are quite distinctive and just great. I particularly found Salt Fish Girl a haunting peculiar novel with a sensory quality like no other I've read. Needless to say, therefore, I was honoured by what she wrote about my book—and of course I'm very grateful.
Here is what she wrote:
Michael Boyce’s Anderson is a neo-modernist novel for the new masculinity. You could think of it as the love child of a threesome among Virginia Woolf, Alfred Hitchcock and Yoshihiro Tatsumi. What I’m trying to say is: this is the weirdest novel I’ve read in a decade, and I mean that in a good way. Michael Boyce has produced a wonderfully interior, completely over-the-top, disturbing and hilarious portrait of the inner life of a self-confessed detective of the soul. It remakes urban-realism, 1930s fatale-noir and dark fantasy to produce a genre that queries the relationship between text and experience, or, if you prefer, body/mind and representation. It makes an art of telling feeling to exhaust the language of affect, producing emotive and spiritual perception anew. After irony lies a blacker humour that possesses the body and haunts the reader to the edge of her capacity to perceive.
—Larissa Lai, 2010
