The Sadist is a sleaze paperback from 1962, one that is usually credited to (future best seller) Lawrence Block (writing under a pseudonym). This piece ranks as one of the most depraved and amoral books I've read, alongside the hideous and poetic polemic Bronson: Blind Rage by "Philip Rawls" (which I've also reviewed).
Although perhaps nothing can rival the extremity and disgusting creativity of a Wade Garrett book (excepting maybe some by Edward Lee), The Sadist and Blind Rage are not extreme horror, but amoral crime novels with corroded world views that take place on a sickly planet earth. Thus the nastiness in The Sadist is not a bravura display of repellent ingenuity, but an extension of the character's vile subconscious.
That the authors of both books wrote under false names is not telling of the quality of the books, which is quite high, but the odious content presented therein.
The Sadist is about a hitman, which is usually not my favorite subject matter for a crime book or movie, since button men are usually aloof and dispassionate mechanics or swaggering perfectionists who have some moral boundaries. Not so with the titular character in The Sadist. Protagonist Jack Garth is an uncommonly mean ultra alpha, but his methodology/intellect and his nasty impulses are not always in synch. It is interesting to follow his warped thought process as he tries to justify doing things that he knows he shouldn't do...
The setup involves him being hired to go to Albany to murder an entire family---mother, father, three kids---so that an indebted dude will receive an inheritance and can pay back his mob debt. Life is very, very cheap in this book.
The other main thread involves an amateur prostitute, and this story feels a bit like padding thrown in to grow the novel to full length (and provide other different sexual scenarios). In the end, it is interesting enough, though not as compelling or harrowing or surprising as the bulldozing Jack Garth sequences.
While some sleaze paperbacks from this era did little more than provide colorful breast metaphors and vaguely described "aberrant" sexual behavior, this book genuinely feels like it might have been illegal to own. An ugly and crisp piece of hate, The Sadist delivers far, far, far more nastiness than the lurid cover suggests.
The Immaculate Void (Brian Hodge) Review
Somewhere between M. John Harrison's Light and John Langan's The Fisherman floats The Immaculate Void, the newest accomplishment by Brian Hodge.
If those reference points excite you--and they should, if you're into thoughtful and frightening weird writing--it is easy to recommend Hodge's novel, wherein he plays cleverly with structure, time, and style while connecting tiny constellation dots and heavily burdened characters with some violent red slashes. A brother and sister, rock climbing, a child murderer, a missing Jovian satellite, and an anomaly in an oven are all key elements in this surprising book.
I'm somewhat new to Hodge--I didn't care for World of Hurt, though really savored Whom the Gods Would Destroy--and the high-minded concepts herein are as original in the world of cosmic horror as those found in The Fisherman. Although Hodge's images may not be as vividly detailed as Langan's, the length of this tale and its pace and the introduction of new ideas are more deftly accomplished and the emotional resonance similarly strong.
There is some really great sense of wonder sci-fi material here--Greg Bear, Greg Egan, M. John Harrison kinda stuff--and these inspired imaginings took my mind to some interesting places while nasty acts are enacted or recounted in seeming counterpoint.
Cosmic and intensely personal, The Immaculate Void is an outward glimpse beyond the ken of man and into the direct center of his mind. Well done!
Gutter Girl (Lawrence Block, Andrew Shaw) Review
Gutter Girl is another unwholesome gem credited to Lawrence Block, writing under the pseudonym Andrew Shaw. Between this book and the equally noteworthy (and far more hateful), The Sadist (reviewed by me elsewhere), I read a "legit" Block novel, The Sins of the Fathers, the first in his long running Matt Scudder series.
Hm.
Both sleaze books have plenty of sexuality and depravity, but also heart and immediacy, whereas the mainstream book has a disenfranchised guy piecing together a mystery, wherein most of the unpleasantness is told second and third hand after the fact and cobbled together. The Scudder book was fine but completely forgettable, excepting only the very strong conclusion.
Obviously, I prefer the vivid and harrowing sleaze books, though of course reading such stuff requires an acceptance of some gratuitous sexuality (likely required by the publisher to match the cover).
A good comparison for Gutter Girl are those great pre-code gems that crept out of ancient Hollywood--things like Three on a Match or Two Seconds---in that the tale is a simply presented story of a person whose desires and ambitions drive them to fleeting happiness, desperate actions, and terrible decisions. In this one, the titular Gutter Girl is Donna Waldek, and her story is not a happy one. This lower east side deb for a teen gang moves neighborhoods and strives to improve her situation (and that of her kid brother), but the environments and circumstances and her own morals drive her onward toward trouble. More than a few times I was reminded of Richard Price's The Wanderers (which it predates), and a book of early 1960s gang life with kids this outrageously nasty would have been engrossing enough, but the story and environment progress with the character into a more expansive tale.
Donna is flawed, but rendered quite sympathetically and with far more depth than the copy on the back cover would lead one to suspect and this book is wholly her story. This short novel yields the violence and sexuality that's advertised--it's dirty and has a few moments of violence that would throw this into an NC-17 rating--but Block does not at all sidestep the psychological cost of such a lifestyle. Different readers will have very different reactions with this one for certain, and the unexpected conclusion makes for a very uncomfortable reading experience.
In a way, the story obliquely and coolly investigated in Sins of the Father is the main story here in Gutter Girl--there are more than a few parallels--but the latter sleaze is the far more emotionally engaging experience. I'm certainly more interested in complex characterization of flawed humans who are their own worst enemies than in the question, "whodunnit?"
I'll continue to read more Block, and I'm curious to see if unfiltered, Sleazy Block continues to trump legit Bestselling Block in terms of quality and emotional resonance.
BLAME! MASTER EDITION 6 (Tsutomu Nihei, 弐瓶 勉, Melissa Tanaka (Translator)) Review
Tsutomu Nihei's beautifully drawn and interestingly conceived series Blame! landed poorly for me, squarely where I was hoping it would not land...
I enjoy ambiguous narratives (Lynch's Lost Highway is an all time favorite, and I like Panos, Jodorowsky, and Yorgos movies quite a bit), and I enjoy interesting science fiction (especially hard stuff like Greg Egan and Stephen Baxter), but from the third (Master Edition) volume of Blame! onward, I was concerned that rather than resolve the interesting elements put into play, Nihei would simply repeat what he had done earlier.
Beautifully drawn, Blame! is:
1. Characters explore excellent, atmospheric, and arterial environments;
2. Protagonists fight H.R. Geiger/Bubblegum Crisis mechs (mostly but not always comprehensibly);
3. With little exposition or unclear exposition, "people" toss around odd tech allusions
If the piece had far less technobabble and was akin to something like Daft Punk's Electroma, I could have enjoyed this as an abstruse, visually lush cyberpunk travelogue, but the introduction of so many plot elements hampered my ability to relish the action and environments on a simpler/more emotional level because my brain was so tied up with all of the data and enigmas, trying to make some sense of things.
I'm sure some understood this series better than I did, but considering that some of the action itself is unclear, I'm not certain how much of this was supposed to be "ambiguous" or just wound up that way...possibly to make it seem deeper or to cover up haphazard narrative that stitches battles together.
So in the end, Nihei's insistence on continually introducing new plot ideas and concepts and having almost incessant action rather than resolving anything led me to feel the story was at its best, most engrossing, most atmospheric, most intelligible and--in many ways--most complete when I had only read the first book, possibly the first two, rather than all six, which expanded, complicated, and repeated the experience of the first two less enjoyably and less clearly, again and again.
For this reason, I preferred the far shorter (and still narratively challenging) Abara by this incredible illustrator and designer.
Update:
I had hoped to have better luck with BioMega, but didn't. Again, I enjoyed the first third and found that the story grew increasingly confusing (both in terms of plot and the scratchy artwork during the action sequences) as things progressed.
Although I should've already learned my lesson regarding Nihei, I am reading Aposimz and hope that it coheres better than the aforementioned, but I have doubts...
Wanted: Sin Men (David Case; Don Holliday) Review
Wanted: Sin Men was my second David Case sleaze/softcore book and is a good example of the benefits of writing in such a lurid genre. Since the audience was guaranteed to some extent for this early 1960s smut by the genre and cover art, the writer had some real freedom to just tell a story about troubled folks. In this case, those folks are five very different escaped convicts who banded together underneath an alpha male, aptly named "Bull", after a prison bus wrecked en route from a work detail.
The book explores these five erstwhile prisoners, both their past crimes and their current transgressions, and each individual is quite distinctly rendered. A lot of the prose details the concerns and irritations and hopes and shames circling inside of each man's head.
The sexual component in this book is far less than in Case's Beast of Shame (and most sleaze/softcore books I've read), and had these few sequences be toned down or removed this could have been a Gold Medal Paperback, albeit a loose and depraved one. Much of what ensues in Wanted: Sin Men has a real time urgency with the quintet on the run, so it's always engaging.
While the conclusion of one story/character feels contrived, the storylines of Bull and Sonny are very evocative, somber, and unpleasant experiences. An encounter one man has with a wretched prostitute named Hazel ranks amongst the most squalid illicit sequences I've yet read, and the final moments with Sonny and Bull are quite memorable and emotional in very different (and surprising) ways.
Under the guise of smut, Case wrote a propulsive, unpredictable, and occasionally agonizing novel that may appeal to fans of Jim Thompson, the cult film Welcome Home, Soldier Boys, and those Vin Packer (read: Marijane Meaker) Gold Medals about "troubled folks."