Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness - Hardcover

Like any great work of art, Angelhead reads as if it were written to save the author's life. In that manner, it's a necessary book, one that will undoubtedly make you think about how relatively sane your little life seems. The doctors finally called Michael a "paranoid schizophrenic," but where's the awful beauty in that? Far more interesting is the fire-and-brimstone brilliance of the writing that amounts to the author's own diagnosis. "I'd been sucked into Michael and God and Satan's void," Bottoms writes, "an upside-down world where dreams were as solid as stone. I wanted, for one fleeting moment, to have hallucinated, to have broken through reality's delicate plane and into the world of the insane. - Esquire This is a remarkable book...which sets into brilliant and devasting relief the contrast between the hellish collapse of the author's family and his brother's mind, and the relative ease and security that most of us experience as ''home''. I learnt a lot from this book - Bookseller

Set in Tidewater, Virginia, in the 1980s and early 1990s, this volume documents the violent, drug-addled descent of the author's brother, Michael, into paranoid schizophrenia. From Micheal's first psychotic break aged 14 - out of his mind on acid, seeing God in his suburban bedroom window - through a series of petty crimes, bizarre disappearances, and suicide attempts to the shocking crime that landed him in the psychiatric wing of a maximum-security prison. This book enables the reader to witness first-hand the fragmenting of a mind and a family. The author's prose offers no consolation or easy answers - simply emotional precision and hard truth.