Creature of Bad Habits

The eerie feeling one gets while reading We Are All of Us Left Behind is a consequence of Bradley Somer’s gift for putting cruelty and violence on the page. Unquestionably, Somer is making a statement about identity, desire, and the emptiness of lies, but it’s his penchant for gore that makes his latest story so memorable. Days after I’d finished this lacerating novel, I was still twitching with revulsion.

The unnamed narrator bears the brunt of the onslaught. Unschooled, uncouth, and from a broken home on the Alberta prairie, the teenager is living a life of crime at the beginning of the book: locked in a cycle of hitting rock bottom and conniving his way to moments of stability, only to be beaten, usually physically, back to destitution. Travel presents him with new vistas and new people, but each opportunity ends badly, and he is reduced again to despair. The episodes grow increasingly weird, stretching credulity. Penniless and sleeping rough in Rome, he...