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Title: Blood Sports

Subtitle: A Novel

Author: Eden Robinson

Narrator: Matthew Josdal

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins

Language: English

Release date: 01-20-15

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

A young man with a questionable past must survive a nightmare of terror and torture in this dark and powerful thriller from one of Canada's most acclaimed contemporary authors.

The Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, Canada, is about as close to urban hell as you can get in the Western Hemisphere. Yet in this cauldron of drugs, shattered dreams, and extreme violence, Tom Bauer and his girlfriend Paulie - both ex-junkies and parents of baby Melody - are trying to make a life for themselves. For years, Tom, an epileptic, was firmly under the thumb of his psychopathic criminal cousin Jeremy, who dragged Tom down into a netherworld of addiction, prostitution, pornography, sadism, and murder. But those days are over, or so Tom believes - until the day that he returns home from work to find two vicious thugs waiting for him and Paulie, and little Mel gone. What happens next will change Tom's life forever and outdo every horror that still dwells in the shadows of his memory.

In this sequel to her critically acclaimed novella Contact Sports, author Eden Robinson returns to the gritty urban landscape of inner-city Vancouver and offers a disturbing view of human lives on a razor's edge. A story that jumps freely backward and forward in time, presented in a brilliant and unconventional tapestry of literary styles, Robinson's second novel is truly a mind-blowing experience that will thrill, move, enthrall, and horrify listeners in equal measure.

Members Reviews:

Loved it

The ending was unexpected and badass

Wish it didn't just jump to different stories

Is a must read if you like R rated material

Knowing this exists doesn't make one want to read about it in detail

California has East LA, BC has Vancouver's East Side. This is a story of people who live there and cope with its demise. I didn't look at the other reviews for this book and decided to read it based upon the fact I'd read Monkey Beach. Knowing that drug culture involves torture, depravity, murder, degradation does not make one ready to spend hours reading about it in detail. Some books make one decide that's life's too short.

Frightened me but I needed to keep Reading

I didn't love this book. In fact it scared me. Drugs, pornography, murders and random violence. This is a world that is so foreign to my comfortable, middle class existence. It kept me on the verge of tears, and created a knot in my stomach that threatened to tighten with each violent act.

Tom and Paulie are trying to escape all this for the sake of their young daughter Melody. They are having a rough go of it. Paulie attends daily NA (Narcotics Anonymous) meetings and has kept clean for 3 years. Between his alcholic mother and his psycopath cousin Jeremy, Tom's not having much success. He has done things with and for his cousin that few of us could ever imagine. Using a sledge hammer to pound human bones to shards being one that made me cringe.

This story is gritty and it gets right into your soul. I'm not going to embrace it and remember it fondly. Its going to come back and haunt me. I am going to see each of these characters as I walk along some dank, shadowy alley.

One thing that I found made this book so successful at conveying this creepy feeling was the way the story jumped around in time. If it had been told beginning to end, I could have dealt with that. I was kept unbalanced by not knowing when I was at all times.