Me and Kev

by Simon Black

Book Overview

After a severe beating, young Steven Jones dies to his parents but continues to live as the playmate of an imaginary companion he has discovered inside himself called Kev. Kev helps Steven over some... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1880909081
• ISBN13: 9781880909089
• Release Date: October 1993
• Publisher: Baskerville Publishers
• Length: 263 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Into the abyss of the mind

The "Me" of Me and Kev is an 11year old boy named Steven Jones. At the outset of the book, he tries a game of his own devising--acting just like his father. This entails getting very drunk on whiskey, walking around in his underwear and verbally abusing his mother to the neighbors. Neighbors who start not seeing the amusement when Steven's mother arrives and attempts to drag him home, especially when Steven begins to hit his mother just like his dad would. The object of the game, after all, is to be exactly like his father.His father comes home, brutally beats him, and from this moment on, the sad and unusual life of Steven Jones gets even more sad, unusual and disturbed. While he is being beaten he comes to realize something: his father has actually beaten him to death, there is a teeny-tiny little boy inside of him--"Hi, I'm Kevin"--and though Steven Jones is dead, there is an invisible presence around this new Kevin-child, and that presence is both himself-who-once-was-Steven and Kev's father.This presence-around-Kev moves the dead Steven Jones's body through the daily routine of living and going to school, but physically does little else. Instead, the narrator (for he does not identify as Steven anymore, Steven was beaten to death by his father in a drunken rage, we are reminded) plays games and spins fantastic stories to Kev, who is a very little boy that will never grow up. These stories, which the narrator knows as both false lies and honest truths, tell the stories of how the body of Steven Jones and Kev and the narrator are made to live in the Land of Worms where everyone is separate from everyone else.If this weren't disturbing enough, after a period of years of basically existing (one is hard pressed to say "living") with Kev, suddenly the narrator stumbles upon one of the town's outcast, Clara, who apparently is able to see into Steven's body and see Kev. Both the story and the narrator's life take a turn for the unexpected and horrific when Kev leaves Steven's body and goes to visit, and then live with, Clara. Clara--known to Kev and the narrator as Mara--is in fact Kev's mother.The book is one of those rare ones that make a sort of perfect, twisted sense while reading, but is almost impossible to coherently tell someone else about who's not read it. Indeed, the blurb on the inside of the dust jacket totally failed to interest or inform me about the book, and if I didn't just start reading--and get pulled in from page #1--I doubt I would have bothered to read it.Mr. Black takes us into a very strange realm where, like the narrator, we suddenly can see things as true, false, and sometimes both at the same time--writing with both the black and red part of the typewriter ribbon, as it were. At once it feels like this is a story about the narrator suffering from untreated schizophrenia, and then, in a twinkling-- like the times when Mara talks about things she couldn't have known about, things Kev to

let me go. i never wanted to come back.

If you love silly escapes with mature themes then this book is for you. i could not put it down and i was never looking away.The ability of Mr Black to capture so perfectley the imagination of a disturbed little boy makes you wonder if there was a little bit of himself in there .I am almost positive that there is.If you are willing to delve a little further then you will realize that this is a book about child abuse. It can be very disturbing. An emotinal rollercaoster.