LOBSTER

An erotic shellfish fable.

Despite an opening reminiscent of Finding Nemo—“Lobster didn’t want to go. He put up a fight”—Lecasble’s debut, published in France in 2003, requires a rating considerably more stringent than PG. Offering a sex scene between a crustacean and a female human, this story gives voice to wild, sometimes horrific expressions of imaginative energy and anthropomorphic fantasy. Captured by fishermen, our eponymous hero finds himself on board the Titanic in a glass tank from which he watches his parents taken away, murdered and served to diners. His father is consumed with particular relish by a depressed, opium-addicted beauty named Angelina. Heading for a similar fate, Lobster is saved from death by the iceberg collision. Free, he finds Angelina and experiences twin emotions: vengeance and lust. After giving her her first orgasm, the two escape to a lifeboat but are separated. Angelina reappears in New York, where her quest to find Lobster, involving experiments with other crustaceans, results in gruesome physical impairment. Lobster, meanwhile, enjoys an underwater orgy that leads to a mammoth lobster harvest. Jules, the fisherman who hauls in the miracle catch, senses that Lobster is special, and the two become companions. Jules is heading to Paris to buy a tattoo parlor, and during the sea voyage encounters Angelina, who has in mind the same destination. When she visits the parlor for a lobster tattoo, Lobster, in the next room, recognizes her and commits a desperate act.

A brief, bizarre, boiling broth of surrealism, romantic fatalism and slapstick. Not for the squeamish.