Pure Slaughter Value

Praise

"The new Lost Generation finds an accomplished mouthpiece in Bingham…an agile, savagely funny writer…it’s fun to watch his brainy, abject characters tie themselves in knots." –Publishers Weekly

"Robert Bingham writes like the bastard nephew of John Cheever.  His masterfully crafted portraits of the American ruling class are at once casually intimate and coruscating.  A spy in the dorm rooms and the boardrooms of privilege, he stalks where hacks have rushed in before him, and brings back stories we have never quite heard before–stories that are difficult to forget."
–Jay McInerney

"Robert Bingham’s Pure Slaughter Value is a very fine thing–eerie and precise, deadpan but full of wicked subcurrents, sexual, psychological, and otherwise–a real marvel of wild, heavy thinking disguised as stories so quiet and even-keeled that you literally don’t know what hit you."
–Dennis Cooper

"Pure Slaughter Value is a fine debut for a writer who is loaded with talent."
–Ward Just

"Like their author, these characters are ferociously wised up.  Think of social, fiduciary, and erotic affiliations between the children of John Cheever’s characters and Robert Stone’s.  Think of Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s offspring, but with more than two wits to rub together.  Why the long faces? Asked and answered by Bingham’s drug- and booze-fuzzed (but agonizingly alert), precociously tapped-out protagonists.  The narrators of the first-person tales are ferally unforgiving of themselves, feeling corruptions surging through their privileged genes like viral time-bombs.  Bingham’s voices–truly one collective voice, with relentless consistency of moral vision–are immediate: a Bingham character lives bang in this New York minute, morally vigilant, nobody’s fool but his own fool.  These stories hurt; they’re meant to hurt, one hundred percent felt."
–Geoffrey Wolff

"You take some fascinatingly unlikable characters, mash them up with  chillingly despicable ones, incorporate them in surprising and funny stories, and you get a convincing mÚlange called Pure Slaughter Value that you wish wasn’t so convincing.  You then try to comfort yourself with the thought that your creations remind you of no more than 50% of the people you know."
–Amanda Filipacchi

"[Bingham] writes with elegance and economy and a wicked sense of humor."
–Los Angeles Times