Harper Perennial, 304 pages, paperback, $13.99

When a talented author fictionalizes real life, the result is often visceral literature that, regardless of genre, reads like mixture of drunken confession and passionate soliloquy. In the case of Mark SaFranko’s Hating Olivia, the true story of a troubled relationship became a novel in which the unique and the universal compete for space, language makes even the darkest situations shine, and the tension is akin to tapping an exposed tooth nerve with a hammer.

Hating Olivia tells the story of Max Zajack, a struggling musician who dreams of being a successful writer. His life is an aimless, bleak succession of dead-end jobs, drunken nights, cheap rooms, dark thoughts, and lonely evenings. That changes when he meets the beautiful Olivia Aphrodite. Soon Max is sharing a bed with Olivia. They share dreams and vices, plans for the future, and a crippling laissez-faire that wrecks havoc on their finances. While the sex is great and the couple really likes to envision a future in which they’re both writers, reality is monster knocking at the door, and soon what started out as a great love story turns into a violent, obsessive, emotionally draining nightmare. The two loners, who originally thought they’d found happiness in each other, push their relationship until it becomes a destructive force that threatens to overpower them and obliterate the last shards of their sanity.

The first time I encountered SaFranko’s prose was in No Strings, which I previously reviewed. It made me seek out his earlier work, and what I found was this extraordinary novel. Hating Olivia is a story of love turned toxic and two individuals who seem more afraid of being lonely than they are of murdering each other. However, that description doesn’t even begin to describe what’s contained in the book. For starters, there is a raw, powerful force behind every description that lets the reader know every argument, slammed door, and painful feeling occurred in the real world way before it was ever written. Also, SaFranko’s chameleonic prose continually and seamlessly changes nature, going from straightforward poetry to pornography and from philosophy to nostalgia. If you can imagine Nietzsche, Bukowski, and Henry Miller thrown in a blender with a can of nonchalant elegance, you have an idea of what SaFranko’s writing is like.

Max and Livy are unique characters, but what they go through, their descent into a maelstrom of ache and madness, is something everyone has tasted to some degree. This combination of distinctive and widespread, along with dark humor and a straightforward-yet-beautiful prose, makes Hating Olivia a rare thing: one of those 300-page tomes that’s devoured with the easy of a short story.

Hating Olivia is about love, lust, and hate, but it’s also about writing, violence, not wanting to work, self-abuse, infidelity, rape, broken families, loneliness, obsession, clinging to hope, and despair. This is a love story for people who hate love stories: a ferociously honest narrative by an author who delivers what he went through without restraints.