Headcheese

Review\n'Winesburg, Ohio for the 4chan age, Headcheese isn't so much a novel as a living, gasping community, united by dismemberment, like phantom limbs holding hands across the world. Headcheese isn't profoundly disturbing because its characters are fetishistic freaks, but because Jess Hagemann surgically inserts you so deep inside their reality that amputation begins to feel like a fundamental part of the human condition you've been missing out on your whole life. Reading Headcheese is like realizing the chainsaw was the hero of Texas Chain Saw Massacre and that nothing brings us closer to our true selves than understanding what we'd cut away. Jess Hagemann does for dismemberment what Ishmael did for whales-revealing the whole world inside the tiniest details.'
Newsweek\n'A provocative and ingeniously assembled novel with enough debauched imagination-and perverse reality-to satisfy even the most morbidly curious reader. If this book was a Google search, you'd read it in incognito mode.'
Katie Rife, A.V Club
'Jessica Hagemann's years of talent as a ghost writer shine in her fiction debut: these characters are so real and raw they practically bleed off the page.'
Robert Ashcroft, author of The Megarothke
'Jessica Hagemann's Headcheese unfolds like a Borgesian model of everything: consensual maiming, mutilation, bondage, domination, submission, power, the human heart and all its shapeshifting ways. Just as classical compilators collected the literary fragments or disjecta membra (literally, scattered limbs) of signal authors, so Hagemann presents a treasury of fiction, fact, fantasy, anecdote, parable, fetish and figure. The result is utterly unexpected: a treatise on amputation which stitches tender links. Obscene but never dirty, the urges of this book are as direct, precise and hygienic as the blade which cleaves and cleaves.'
Joyelle McSweeney, Action Books
'A complete collection of psychological mind-fuckery; launching you into the dark depths of body modification and amputee fetishism. Headcheese is a trip down the rabbit hole into a world you've never seen or known.'
Russ Foxx, Body Piercing & Modification Specialist
'Chuck Palahniuk writes the House of Leaves of amputee fetishism. Jess Hagemann represents a bold new voice in literary horror.'
Preston Fassel, author of Our Lady of the Inferno\nThe day that Lorrie "accidentally" cuts off her little toe, she discovers what it's like to be able-bodied and not want that body.
After Bartholomew loses his left arm to a landmine, he's inspired to start a new kind of church-one where both amputation and sex are types of performance art.
Trice, a prosthetics engineer, receives the assignment of a lifetime when he's asked to rebuild his son's crippled frame.
Haunted by the memory of his dead wife, George must take the ultimate measure to excise her ghost. For good.
From sexual fetish to the clinical diagnosis of Body Integrity Identity Disorder, Headcheese makes the first cut, peeling back the epidermis to peer inside the minds and hearts of 26 people navigating the topography of flesh.\nJess Hagemann is an award-winning author and accomplished biographer. She lives in a quiet Austin neighborhood surrounded on three sides by cows. Headcheese is her first novel.