I'm somewhat familiar with John Shirley's work. I've read a couple of his short stories, know he wrote the Bioshock t[image]
I think I need a tissue...
I'm somewhat familiar with John Shirley's work. I've read a couple of his short stories, know he wrote the Bioshock tie-in novel and also had his espionage work loosely adapted for a Sly Stallone movie. But this is my first full-length novel by him and if there's one thing I know about his work, it's that when he busts out the creative chops, he flies so far over the line, you'd think he was using a ski-jump.
The set-up only takes a couple pages. Martin - AKA Zero - and his chums stumbled upon what looks like a outdoors rave in a tent in the middle of the city. Except its not. Turns out to be an organic spacecraft which whisks them and those caught inside to the nightmarish world of Fool's Hope, overseen by an unknowable hive-mind known as the Meta. And for Zero and co, their problems are just starting.
The first thing that pops out to me is just the sheer visuals of Fool's Hope. Shirley said that he wanted to create a literary surreal nightmare and I think it's safe to say he knocked that fucker out of the park. The sheer amount of descriptive designs for the world is both a blessing and a curse. It creates a rich vibrant world which puts you on edge all the time.
Fool's Hope is WEIRD! Nothing is what it seems, the world makes zero consistent sense by human standards and what might look familiar very quickly isn't. And Fool's Hope isn't just home to humans. The Meta have been nicking other alien races from around the galaxy as well and they're just as incomprehensible as the rest of the world. But this descriptive feast is both a blessing and a curse. While it creates for a wild environment to explore and immerse yourself in, sometimes it becomes a lot of a lot. The number of times I found myself skimming setpieces because it just became too much to process after a while got a bit under my skin. It wasn't a dealbreaker and I'm sure more attentive people will lap it up, but for me I did have my limits.
It does help though, that the plot itself is pretty straightforward. After the first half establishes Zero on the world, trying to acclimatize to things, the second half becomes a quest plot, with Zero and a small group of survivors traveling to a 'Progress Station', where the Meta leave behind useful tech for survival. Kinda like Roadside Picnic but with more Shoggoths.
But what's a story without conflict? And in A Splendid Chaos, the conflict comes in the form of Fiskle, a sociology professor who was caught in an planetary anomaly called 'The Current', which twists and mutates living creatures into warped exaggerations of themselves. So naturally Fiskle develops a God Complex, establishes a cult and attempts a takeover of the planet. And Zero and co are in his crosshairs....
Which brings me onto characters. Overall, it's a mixed bag. Shirley doesn't spend a lot of time at the start developing the characters. Only enough to give them names and basic character traits before he dumps on the planet. And the same applies to the rest of the cast. The named characters of the human settlement are basic bitches with basic traits. Here's the tough lesbian, here's the former cop, here's the naive poli-sci student who thinks democracy will work. The same applies to Fiskle's cult. Here's the gibbering sycophant, here's the gender-swapped bloodthirsty sexpot, here's the heavies who function as preachers. It's all pretty by the book. Even Fiskle himself is something of a one-note dude, being given just enough traits for you to know he's a shifty prick before the Current warps him into a megalomaniac with a god-complex.
But when the characters do work, Shirley makes them work. Zero functions as an audience surrogate, lost and confused, stuck with existential dread but over time develops into someone you could call heroic. One of Fiskle's cult starts to have doubts and develops empathy for the humans. Hell even two of Zero's group - two aliens from different races - are given solid characterization, even if only to establish how different they are from the human cast.
And the gore!
[image]
One thing I know about Shirley is that his gore is very visceral and very nasty. And while he uses it sparingly here, when he commits to it, he goes full on. The scene where Fiskle and his cult deal with a traitor is goopy and horrifying and given how casual the whole scene plays out, it's a visual nightmare.
A Splendid Chaos for me is a mixed bag in all the right and wrong ways. Shirley did succeed in creating a surrealist nightmare, but I would say he sacrificed familiarity a bit too much to get there. The characters vary from bland to solid enough to keep the story going. The plot is basic but doesn't overstep its boundaries as to be alienating and the visual spectacles on display can be both amazing in terms of gore and beautiful or the equivalent of this:
[image]
It's still a recommend from me, because despite all my gripes, its something I seek from any piece of fiction. It's original, it's distinct and it's interesting.
Just...don't take any mushrooms beforehand. Or do. I'm not your dad....more
As much as I love contemplative, thematic stories that explore ideas and concepts, sometimes I just wanna crack open a book that iSo here's the thing.
As much as I love contemplative, thematic stories that explore ideas and concepts, sometimes I just wanna crack open a book that is the literary equivalent of a big bucket of buttered popcorn. Something with bombastic fight scenes and ridiculous characters and a roller-coaster plot that leaves me clenching my buttcheeks because I'm trying not to bounce up and down on my seat like a ten year old.
So when I started the audiobook for One Tough Bastard and it opened with an opening intro like the preview for an 80's action flick, complete with shotguns, explosions and the narrator attempting to sneer through his teeth like Dirty Harry, I knew I was in for a good time.
One Tough Bastard is both a love letter and a piss-take of action movies from the 80s/90s. The main character - Shane Moxie, arse-kicker extraordinaire - is cut from the same cloth as Steven Seagal; an arrogant, swaggering tosspot who thinks too highly of himself and his skills. The plot could be a film script in itself in how bonkers it is. The violence is visceral and gratuitous. The comedy is lowbrow and crosses so many lines it might be on some sort of list for literary war atrocities. It is GLORIOUS and I fucking loved every second of it.
The main characters are all fun and engaging each in their own ways. Shane for all his many, many faults is surprisingly easy to empathize with, if only because he is such a colossal fuckup that it's a wonder he manages to get by without some form of special needs assistant. It also helps that he shows quite a bit of character development over time and becomes just a little less of an arsehole. Duke, our resident talking chimp, is surprisingly human and probably has some of the best moments in the book, when it comes to sheer badassery. It helps too, that he plays the straight man to Shane's unintentional comedy. Klaus Kaiser - our resident bad-guy - is every bit as menacing as he is scary. He's basically Schwarzenegger if Arnie was a Bond Villain; ruthless, vicious, uncompromising and calculating.
[image] This is Shane Moxie. He's gonna kick your arse.
The tone of the book is solid throughout. Howe clearly has a deep love for the action movies of old as the style of the writing, the style/behaviour of the characters and the pacing all feel like they come straight from those movies. Hell, even Moxie's movies feel like the type of bargain basement movies Cannon Films put out on a regular basis.
[image] Coming soon to Netflix....
But Howe also shows more than a surface level understanding of those movies. I wasn't kidding when I said the story was a piss-take on those movies. A lot of the comedy comes from how much Moxie embodies the best and worst qualities of movies from that time. He's crude, sexist, incompetent and so swaggeringly dumb, its a miracle he can tie his shoes. But at the same time, none of this comes from a hateful place. He's basically the teenage boy who idolized action stars and became one. He just forgot to grow up. Never mind the fact that his movies are genuine trashy shit.
[image] Put this on Amazon Prime now!
So are there any flaws? A couple, enough that it did affect my enjoyment. For starters, while Howe's love of action movies is on full display throughout the book, sometimes it gets a bit excessive, to the point where it feels like he's just rattling off things for nerd cred. For example, about half-way through the book, Moxie and Duke go the Kaiser's HollyWorld restaurant to scout out the place. What follows as they enter, is roughly two and a half pages of non-stop paraphernalia from various action movies littered around the place. Conan's sword, Cobra's pistol, the bus from Speed (I kid you not) etc, etc, etc. And it goes ON AND ON. It doesn't stop. It got to a point where I was checking the time to see how much longer it would go.
[image] He's looking to SLEIGH some terrorists.
The second problem requires me to spoil Kaiser's big villain motive so if you don't want to know, basically it feels a little hamfisted and crude for a man who's spent the entire novel carefully planning things.
(view spoiler)[So basically, Kaiser is convinced that the United States has become weak in the wake of the Cold War, what with the rise of women's rights, LGBT rights etc. It's a little more complex than that, but the general gist is that because of things like this, American men likewise have become soft. So he wants to funnel cocaine across the country to fuel drug wars, which he can use in a political campaign to become president and "harden" the US. In short, Kaiser's a man who believes in his own masculine hype so much, he's drunk his own Kool-Aid and gone full manosphere mode. Now granted, Howe devotes a good chunk of time to Kaiser's backstory to highlight how he became like this. His history behind the Iron Curtain, his early work in Hollywood, his tours in Afghanistan where he met Colonel Rhodes - war criminal and later his head of security - but it still feels a little on the nose, especially given recent events regarding groups like the Proud Boys. It doesn't ruin the book, but it does make Kaiser feel a lot smaller a villain as a result, which may admittedly have been the point. He's the dark side of an 80's action fandom. (hide spoiler)]
So at this point, would I recommend One Tough Bastard?
Yes. Fuck yes. FUCKING YES.
I clenched my arse with excitement! I pissed myself laughing! I cried with passion! I vomited with glee! ...maybe not that last one....
Honestly, if you have ever enjoyed eating some popcorn and putting on a trashy 80s/90s action flick - something from Cannon or even just from the B-roll catalogue of schlock - you owe to yourself to get this one. It's not perfect, but it does so many more things right than wrong and it's a cracking good time.
Uhhhhhhhhhh.......I'm totally not a furry! I swear!
[image] Totally not thinking about tapping that.
So Carlton Mellick! And his weird books. Books aboutUhhhhhhhhhh.......I'm totally not a furry! I swear!
[image] Totally not thinking about tapping that.
So Carlton Mellick! And his weird books. Books about post-apocalyptica and McDonalds and werewolves and Mad Max style insanity! Fun!
Okay so it was probably around this time when I think Mellick's work hit a decent level of competence. The stuff before wasn't necessarily bad, but it was very rough around the edges. Warrior Wolf Women meanwhile was one of his first actual novels so it comes with all the bells and whistles one would expect with a more fleshed out narrative.
For starters, contrary to previous novellas Mellick is much more about showing and not telling in this story. His novellas usually struggle at times because he tends to opt for explaining the setting and worldbuilding but here he provides a much more fleshed out world. Some of it is still clunky, like having a section of an early chapter have Daniel explain how to make booze out of ketchup packets, but points for effort.
As for the characters, they're a mixed bag like you'd expect and like with any mixed bag, some of them are Twix Bars and others are razor-bladed apples. Daniel is perfectly functional as a protag, being a normal bloke - albeit with two extra pairs of arms - living in a world that is both run by McDonalds and yet somehow also is filled with werewolf biker babes. He feels more like an audience surrogate to ease the reader into the world at large, which for the most part works.
[image] Well, can't say it's not accurate.
The rest of the cast are decently fleshed out with most of the furry cast easily defineable, albeit from a few traits rather than an entire psych profile. Pippi is pretty much a bitch from start to finish, Slayer hates men and sees them as slaves, Nova is the assertive waifu and Alyssa is a depiction of what happens when the werewolf condition goes all the way. From some characters we do get some character development, surprisingly from Daniel's brother Guy, a man with the manliest of moustaches who goes from being a model citizen to a someone sympathetic of the wolf women.
But make no mistake, you're here for the weirdness and the world of Warrior Wolf Women is bizarre, even by Bizarro standards and if uncomfortable forays into sex aren't your thing, then avoid this one like an STD. Considering that sex triggers the transformation, things like rape (from both sides) are explored and it's not comfortable in the slightest, albeit a little skewed towards sympathy for the women. The thing is, like with Bizarro typically, the violence and gruesomeness gets to a point a lot of the time where it stops feeling uncomfortable and more like a cheeseburger induced fever dream. This is a book where a werewolf women the size of a bus uses a bloke as a dildo. I'm not kidding. Mellick must've mined some forum boards for that type of fetish shit.
As for other weirdness, we have realistic mascots with heads made of actual meat and cheese....
[image] This is Mayor McCheese. He would like to have a word with you.
Weird government experiments and body horror parasites that turn people into breeding factories. And the gore. Oh my god, it's like Mellick decided to paint the town red, pink, purple, with shades of brain, intestinal tract and stomach lining. If there was a book that will make you never want to touch a burger again, I think I found it.
Warrior Wolf Women is probably the point where I think Mellick truly came into his own as an author. By the standards of Bizarro fiction - which oftentimes feel a little mediocre - this is a solid outing that switches back and forth between rough subjects and gonzo absurdity at the drop of a hat. The story hits all the right notes, although it can feel like its spinning its wheels at times but comes to a suitably wild, gooey conclusion.
Recommended, assuming you go and find Jesus afterward for your burgeoning Furry fetish, you sick weirdo!
[image] Imagine sticking your soft bits in that. No go get some help freak....more
I only really knew of Anderson Prunty from the title and blurb of one of his earlier books "Slag Attack" which wore its Bizarro fiction roots o[image]
I only really knew of Anderson Prunty from the title and blurb of one of his earlier books "Slag Attack" which wore its Bizarro fiction roots on its sleeve. "Irrationalia" by contrast came across instead as being pretty milquetoast. Four friends all getting together for a reunion, to hash out wounds and old histories?
Boring....
Oh I was wrong. I was so very, VERY wrong.
Right from the outset, the atmosphere of the book crawls with dread. There is something very wrong with the place the four have hooked up at. The maid is robotic, their host and invitee of the four Grant, comes across like something's crawling about inside his skin, wearing it like a suit and the vibe of the place reeks with unease.
The first third or so of the book establishes the mood and characters pretty solidly. Irrationalia fits into the same bucket of books as the works of Irvine Welsh or Brett Easton Ellis, a genre I like to call "Fuck-up fiction". Stories about screwed individuals making sense of their lives and either pulling themselves out of the muck or burying themselves so deep in their own shit that they'd need spelunking equipment to pull themselves out. And in that respect, Prunty doesn't disappoint. Each of the four - Sean, Lena, Edward & Grant - are screwed up in their own ways, to the point where they're their own worst enemy and their reunion is anything but cordial. Old grudges, old emotional wounds, old memories are all explored in various ways across the story and for the most part, it works.
It's in the second third where things start to ratchet up in a nasty way. Make no mistake, the pacing on this book is solid but its also a slow burn. For some, that can be a deal-breaker and if so, I wouldn't blame you. Personally I didn't mind it, because I was so invested in what was going to happen and also listening on audiobook made for a smoother ride. It is however during the second third where I did notice that Prunty handling of the characters was a little lopsided. Two of the minor characters - the maid Natalie and Sean's wife Lexi - really only show up at the start and end of the story and end up feeling like props more than characters. They are given some form of characterisation but its short and a little hollow.
And then we come to the final third of the book and holy fuck, I was not prepared for the ending. Throughout the story, there has been a supernatural angle teased at the happenings of the reunion, but its never outright stated. Is this a malevolent entity? Is this a folie a deux? Its hard to say. The prose gets almost dreamlike at times - despite at other times unfortunately delving into too much telling instead of showing - and by the end I wasn't entirely sure where I stood on what was going on.
But that ending....
[image]
Irrationalia can now join the small fanclub of stories I've read - alongside Chuck Palahniuk's story "Guts" - where I literally had to put the book down for a day just to take a breather. What happens in that ending.... I've read a lot of nasty things. And gore alone doesn't irk me. But the intensity of the writing.... And the actual events that transpire...?
Certainly not gonna forget that shit anytime soon!
Irrationalia isn't perfect. Some of the writing is a little flat, and some of the characterisation is a little lopsided in favour of others and other times gets a little up its own arse for my liking. But the little things weren't enough to ruin the experience. If you like reading about fucked up people diving down fucked up rabbit holes, then give it a crack.
Or maybe not a crack, especially if you're planning on wedging a screwdriver in there.......more
I'll say this about Bizarro Fiction; for better or worse it always manages to surprise me. Whether its seeing the weird and strange ways the genre canI'll say this about Bizarro Fiction; for better or worse it always manages to surprise me. Whether its seeing the weird and strange ways the genre can surprise or repulse me, Bizarro is something to keep an eye on and also want to go wash my hands in industrial bleach afterward.
The Party Lords has a pretty self-explanatory plot. At its core its an 80's teen sex comedy filtered through a Bizarro lens. Buttcrack is a 30 something bloke still going to high school. A hippy student called Perfect Kid is hosting an awesome party but he needs booze. So what follows is Buttcrack's misadventures as he tries to dig up some booze for the party. If nothing else, the plot is pretty easy to follow, with each attempt to dig up some booze getting more and more outlandish until I was stifling nervous giggles at how over the top the story became.
The writing like a lot of Bizarro work I've read, is simple, straightforward with little flounce and flourish. Short sentences with simple descriptions. Point by point explanations and a little infodumping here and there. And for the most part, it works fine. The story is short and basic and doesn't overstay its welcome, but it didn't set my arse-hairs on fire either.
The characters are serviceable enough, pretty much filling out the roles of 80's sex comedies to a tee. Buttcrack is your typical horny protagonist with the key point being that he's over 30 years old, so a lot of the "character development" you see out of him comes from him reconciling his age vs his refusal to grow up against his former schoolmates who have. His best friend Ta-Bone (cause he likes Ta-Bone the ladies) is your typical nerdy weaselly best friend who's desperate to get laid. Ralph is the nervous weird dork (albeit hung like horse with viagra), Renee (whose arse is described as a "rhino butt") is the hot chick at the end of the rainbow and the mutants - yes cause there's mutants in this - are the misunderstood clique who just want to have fun.
The one thing I can say about the Party Lords that makes it stand out is that there's something a little grotty about it. It makes me feel like I'm reading someone's old copy of Hustler with half the pages stuck together. The atmosphere of the novel feels grimy and the characters feel more than a little grungy with moments of really sloppy sex, body mutilation, toilet humour and more bodily fluids than a swinger party where someone spiked the punch with laxatives and Viagra. And whether you see that as part of the book's unashamed charm or is enough of a reason to pitch it out a window is up to you.
Overall, The Party Lords is at best a stupidly fun read that will leave feel like taking a shower afterward. Not a bad thing mind you, because at least that gives you a chance to have a quiet wank....more
We now return to I Knocked Up Satan's Daughter....
Lici: Jonathon....I'm pregnant! And you're the father! Jonathon: But how? We only spent one night togWe now return to I Knocked Up Satan's Daughter....
Lici: Jonathon....I'm pregnant! And you're the father! Jonathon: But how? We only spent one night together! Also you turned my willy black! Shoji: OSUUUUUUUUU! Time to practice my sumo! Dudebros: DUUUUUUUUDE! (Audience laughs, roll credits)
Everywhere you look (everywhere you go) There's a heart (there's a heart) A hand to hold onto.....
So if you haven't figured it out yet, I Knocked up Satan's Daughter is basically a romantic comedy in the rich bloody vein of 90's family comedies and every Matthew McConaughy romcom ever made, albeit from a Bizarro perspective. And to say that this shit is bonkers is an understatement. Jonathon Vanderwoo lives in a house made of Lego...... ...... ...... I'll let that sink in for a moment..... ...... ...... Has it sunk in? Good, cause this gets only weirder,
His best mate is a sumo called Shoji (who is pretty shit at his work). Yes, Lici the soul sucking demon from Hell turned his knob black, her little affectionate way of marking her territory. And yes, Jonathon built that Lego house himself. A full-sized two storey fucking Lego house. And yes, his Lego skills come into play later in the story.
Everything about this story just screams 90's rom-coms/TV sitcoms. The style is light and flouncy, characters react and overreact with the kind of melodrama you'd expect from John Stamos's eyebrows, the dialogue is goofy and heartfelt in the way that gave Bob Saget Tourettes and the characters are by and large the kind of bombastic cardboard cutouts you get from every attempt Kirk Cameron made at a serious film/TV career before his brain overdosed on Jesus Christ and banana analogies. Or every Ryan Reynolds romcom in existence before he got an actual fucking film career.
But this is still Mellick's work which means lots of graphic gooey violence, graphic sex (although here its a little more subdued) and characters that by and large are by and large forgettable after the book is closed. Also, given that the story is basically a 90's romantic sitcom, the plot aside from the Bizarro aspects goes as you'd suspect. Relationship/family complications, soft fluttery moments of the lovebirds, the moment where they split, the climax, the conclusion where everything is resolved, cue audience, roll credits.
This isn't the longest book in the world and given what it was going for, its a decent length without too much needless padding. It's more of a fun lighthearted popcorn read, silly and stupid but engaging enough that at the very least its premise will be memorable enough to stick in your oozing, chewy brains for a while after.
And that's the end of today's review. I hope we all learned a valuable lesson here today folks.....
Gazook the mystical pixie appears! Gazook: Yeah folks! Always brush your teeth with llama spit! Steve: Oh Gazook! Audience Laughter, roll credits....more
So..............Bizarro Fiction................yeah, here we go............
Okay so for the uninitiated. How to describe Bizarro? Hmmmm.....okay. The bSo..............Bizarro Fiction................yeah, here we go............
Okay so for the uninitiated. How to describe Bizarro? Hmmmm.....okay. The best description I've seen was this. You know how when you dream, everything in the context of the dream seems to make sense, but then you wake up and realise that in the dream you were slow-dancing with a carpet python while Margaret Thatcher was singing Wagnerian Ballads in the background and you were all on a desert island on the arse end of Jupiter? And you think.....WTF was that?!
Yeah.......that's Bizarro fiction.......wait...........where are you going?...........DON'T LEAVE ME! I'LL DIE WITHOUT YOU!!!
Okay so now that we've established what it is, let me introduce you to one of the big names in the Bizarro genre: Carlton Mellick III and this here "book": Bio-Melt.
To describe the plotline of Bio-Melt in a nutshell would be a nightmare, but the basic premise - as best as I can describe it - is this. In the future, people of a certain age are expected to physically fuse with another person, in essence forming a new human being with all the memories and experiences of the previous person, albeit free to form their own new identity. Except the person our protag fuses with is on the run. And when they - he/she/it wakes up, things have gone horribly wrong.
To say that Bio-Melt is weird is an understatement. Its a testament to Mellick's commitment to the genre that he takes a basic premise and manages to somehow completely fuck it up in a good way. We have degenerate clones, giant leviathans made from spare body parts, seas of black oily goop, fractured identities, crazed hitmen, nasty gooey violence and some of the messiest most disgusting sex I've read in a book - not by kink or fetish, but because of what is happening to them as they are shagging.
Bio-Melt is also one of Mellick's more recent books and I think it shows a good deal of evolution as a writer. A lot of the earlier works of his I've read had a problem with telling the reader about the weird elements rather than putting them on display and while he still does it here, its a lot more restrained in favour of developing the strangeness of the world. I also think that Mellick works better when he's not focusing on bodily fluids for sheer shock value at the expense of the plot like in The Morbidly Obese Ninja where he goes into graphic detail about the titular ninja's hemorrhoids.
But if there's one thing I've learned from reading Bizarro is that you shouldn't get attached to the characters and Bio-Melt is pretty indicative of that. Outside of the protag - who switches bodies, genders and identities so fast you'd wonder if they were some sort of living embodiment of Tumblr, most of the other characters are pretty barebones and die with disturbing regularity. It ties in with the bleakness of the world but it doesn't make you give two tugs of a dead dog's wanger about them.
Bio-Melt is definitely one of the better stories in Mellick's repetoire and a decent opener if you're at all curious about the Bizarro genre. Honestly though, even this will make the ordinary scrub go crosseyed. There's nothing like Bizarro that I've ever read before and if what I've described doesn't rope you in, then RAR ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE!
Cause it's only going to get weirder from here.........more
Ahhhh young love. That moment in a young boy's life where he meets his first girlfriend. The holding of hands, the first peck on the cheek, that momenAhhhh young love. That moment in a young boy's life where he meets his first girlfriend. The holding of hands, the first peck on the cheek, that moment where you go on your first date and her face explodes like a water balloon filled with pig parts.....
What are you looking at me like that for?
So yeah, that's the central premise of Every Time we meet at the Dairy Queen etc. Boy meets girl, boy loves girl, girl's face explodes. Welcome to Bizarro fiction. As a story, Every Time We Meet at etc is decent. The prose is light and fluffy with the kind of whimsy you'd expect from the mind a young boy in love for the first time, although there are a couple of spots where a swear word comes out of nowhere (presumably to fit in with the book's title). The two main characters are decently developed for the genre, given that generally this is a genre where people have the lifespans of suicidal mayflies. Ethan is a boy in love and so much of his headspace revolves around those first time feelings. Jill (AKA Spiderweb AKA Exploding Face Girl) is spritely and quirky and odd in that way that tells you right from the start that some is off about her. The matter of her explosive face is also handled decently. Under a shittier writer, it would feel like Looney Tunes, but Mellick instead makes it feel chunky and gruesome. Their relationship feels organic, starting with the awkward silences, the attempts at physical contact, that first date leading up to that first kiss, where he gets pieces of her tongue stuck in his throat, all peppered throughout with Spiderweb's tendency to explode like a boiling kettle filled with chunks of horse meat.
But not everything about this story is so well put together. I suspect Mellick hasn't written children much in his career. Ethan is written to be thirteen years old at the start of the book and while I've met my fair share of intelligent thirteen year olds, I haven't met one that speaks as eloquently as Ethan. Also outside of Ethan and Spiderweb, the side characters are very barebones in execution. Spiderweb's family cops the worst of this. Her dad - who patches her up after she explodes - basically functions as an infodump in spots to explain his daughter's origins, her mum pops up for all of maybe two pages before disappearing into the background, dad and mum's relationship is never really elaborated on, the family's "dogs" are used as background fluff even though their presence is actually explained at one point. Even Ethan isn't exempt from this. His own family are barely mentioned, his school friends and classmates function as faceless dickheads who mock and abuse him for being in love. In fact the only character to receive some character is Mark Henney, Ethan's main bully who has his own brand of weirdness.
The overall plot meanwhile is okay. It follows the main story beats you'd expect of a first love story, albeit with some Bizarro elements thrown in throughout. This isn't your typical Bizarro fiction piece where the weird shit is just on display like a dead hooker in the middle of an soiree. It's more a slow burn, slowly giving you bits and bobs throughout, stringing you along until the final "climax" which not only caught me off-guard but reminded me of an old Ren and Stimpy episode. I have to wonder if Mellick meant to write this as some sort of weird allegory for destructive dependent relationships, but I'm not sure if he's ever been the type of writer to think that deeply about exploding faces.
Every Time we meet at the Dairy Queen etc is a decent Bizarro fiction piece. But I think that ultimately the novella structure hurts the book more than helps it. The plot is fluid and streamlined but its at the expense of fleshing out the world and makes for a lot of missed opportunities for additional weirdness. A fun fluffy read, if a little empty.
What is it with me and characters that are so supremely fucked up that they need a bolt-gun worth of tranquilizers to function?!
People need only checkWhat is it with me and characters that are so supremely fucked up that they need a bolt-gun worth of tranquilizers to function?!
People need only check out my reading list on this website to get a good psychological profile of me on the day I initiate "The Device".
The blurb pretty much tells you all you need to know about Filth. Our laddy of the polis, Bruce Robertson can barely be called a human being. He's a vile, racist, sexist sack of shit that undermines his coworkers, fucks his friend's wives and snorts enough cocaine to make Tony Montana go:
[image]
The setup is simple: the son of a Ghana diplomat has been murdered and it's up to the Scottish cops to solve it. Except most of the plot barely touches on this at all. Most of the plot revolves around Bruce faffing about Edinburgh, getting shitfaced, plotting and scheming and dealing with the tapeworm crawling around inside his colon.
[image] Yeaaaaaaaahhhhhh.......
The writing is your typical Irvine Welsh fare; smooth, casual plonker dialect with a strong Scottish drawl deliberately woven into the writing. The pacing is rambling and more like a string of short narratives than a single drawn out story. Unlike Trainspotting, Filth is shorter - given that it only focuses on two characters - and feels a lot more streamlined with the pacing being a lot easier to digest overall.
The characters are.....well......
Typical for Welsh. Bruce is a vile, disgusting human being who revels in the misery of others but as per Welsh's output with ugly protagonists, the real draw is the depths of depravity Bruce will stoop to. It's the car crash mentality; you know he's a shitbag but how much of a shitbag is he? Whether or not you can stomach characters like this really depends on the reader and the strength of the writing and since I can stomach characters like this and Welsh's writing is top-notch and littered with pitch-black humour I liked it.
But then we come to the other main character and this might be where some will balk. You see, the other main character is.....
Yeah, it's a tapeworm. Yeah. That wasn't a knob gag.
After a bad meal, a tapeworm sets up shop in Bruce's colon and develops intelligence, referring to itself as "The Self" and Bruce as "The Host". It begins to ask existential questions of its existence and somehow psychically connects with Bruce, parsing out his history and childhood. Again, how much you can stomach of this idea really depends on the reader. For me, I was fine with it because I both knew about this going in and given all the other insane shit in this book, a sentient tapeworm is the least of my concerns.
If there is one section of the book however that I think will divide people A LOT, it's the ending. I won't give it away here, and peppered throughout the book, this is a metric fuck-ton of foreshadowing that will clue in observant readers but the ending completely changes the entire first 3/4 of the book. For some it will feel earned and appropriate. For others, it might feel like a copout.
Filth is typical Irvine Welsh fare and that means it comes with all the typical things you expect of his work. Pitch-black humour, shitty characters doing shitty things, weirdness and bodily fluids, misery and suffering. It's all there and like with Transpotting beforehand, how much you like it will depend on how much you can stomach.