With his characteristic raw and minimalist style Charles Bukowski takes us on a walk through
his side of town in Hot Water Music. He gives us little vignettes of depravity and
lasciviousness bite sized pieces of what is both beautiful and grotesque. The stories in Hot
Water Music dash around the worst parts of town - a motel room stinking of sick a decrepit
apartment housing a perpetually arguing couple a bar tended by a skeleton - and depict the
darkest parts of human existence. Bukowski talks simply and profoundly about the underbelly of
the working class without raising judgement. In the way he writes about sex relationships
writing and inebriation Bukowski sets the bar for irreverent art - his work inhabits the
basest part of the mind and the most extreme absurdity of the everyday.
