by Garrett Cook
It looks like Carolyn and Mark are in deep, deep shit. Mark and Carolyn live in an alternate 1989 where Ronald Reagan is on his fourth presidential term. The USA has a rigid, long-standing caste system and abortions were never made legal. Being homeless is a crime that is punishable by imprisonment in an internment camp the inmates call Tent City. Most of Mark's ER patients are inmates at this camp and are victims of a new disease these illegals call the Transient Flu. This deadly and rapidly spreading disease mutates with each new host, collecting information, changing code. The disease evolves lightning quick, spreading like pond ripples and infecting everyone. No one is safe. Mark and Carolyn dig too deep and uncover the brutal truth: Transient Flu was purposely made and is one hundred percent fatal. Carolyn's employer, Hudson-Smythe Pharmaceuticals, discovers the chain of evidence. It traces the pharmacide back to Hudson-Smythe and the crime of the century. Cost is no object and deadly force is authorized. Yes. Carolyn and Mark are in deep, deep shit.
Accounts of a dismal post-industrial future, a look at man defiled and in decline. Evil has arrived. Dominion has been taken by those who walk as the damned, demons, halflings, products of debauched rampages and sins against nature. Short stories of darkness and dismay, snorting souls. Sex, drugs, and broken souls are the only things of value. Life is more like a disease, and the only salvation is the right amount of Plata to numb the conscience and, if one is lucky, to bring on a cleverly disguised demise. Through the sheer shock of his presentation, Rage forces readers to consider the alternatives, to look at the garbage in the streets, to see what is swept into the gutters at night right before all decent people awake to see another cleaned up version of the day. He uses tradition to break tradition, to push the imagination in ways that are uncomfortable at the least and border on the offensive at worst. Yet, in doing so, he illustrates what real Love is. Dark shit from The Most Depraved Writer in Print.
Pontius Pilate is cursed to be a vampire. Life after life after life. In a dismal post-industrial future we take a look at man defiled and in decline. Evil has arrived and Dominion has been taken by the damned, the demons, vampires, vicious ghosts and strange halflings. The cast-aside by-products of all the debauched rampages and scientific sins against nature. Sex, drugs, and broken souls are the only trade commodities left. And for the Plata dealing Pilate, his life is more like a death sentence. His only chance surviving is to keep on selling his monthly quota of Plata. This new man-made narcotic is a potent speed-ball designed to amp up the user, while also numbing the conscience into euphoric oblivion. To nullify the pain. To stifle the torture. PILATE is a drug lord vampire in this re-telling of Christ's final days. To save his drug business, his money and his own life, Pilate shall have to allow the torture and death of a Holy Person..
AFTERWORD
If there was one thing that Hunter Thompson demonstrated through his writing and his antics, and we writers can take especial note, is that we are forever haunted by four ghosts, four ‘patron haints’ if I may be allowed to coin a phrase: the Buddha[i], David Hume[ii], Heraclitus[iii], and Werner Heisenberg. I bring this up because I am looking at a painting by Garrett Cook on my wall, and the hellish, lagomorphic landscape reminds me just how small, scary, and wonderful a world it is. With some thoughts on interdependence bubbling up after that, I realized I wanted to make things go ahead correctly.
One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot people review their friends’ work with a less than critical eye. While it’s nice to buoy your friends up a bit with praise, I think it does them a bit of disservice. I’ve seen reviews that are little more than a regurgitation of the jacket copy, and forewords that are no more than a rarefied verbal handjob. Why bother putting that kind of shit out there? I’ve determined that I’m not going to do that. So disclosure time: I am fucking terrified of Garrett Cook.
I met Garrett for the first time at the inaugural BizarroCon, and I picked up on his intensity immediately. Later that weekend he won the very first Ultimate Bizarro Showdown with some weird spontaneous meditation on bestiality that he screamed at full volume in front of a speechless audience. He beat me soundly. He beat all of us soundly, and hell- I had actual antlers hanging off my dick, scarfed handfuls of pills, and read apocalyptic John Entwistle fanfic. Garrett yelled. Ever since then, though we’ve become great friends, I remain afraid of him- afraid that the plane of literary excellence he dwells on will forever be denied me, barring some fortunate accident involving a radioactive typewriter bite.
Murderland, in brief, is the story of Jeremy Jenkins, a mild-mannered pharmacist whose cover story of being a moralizing nebbish hides that he is in fact a vigilante killing the popularly-sanctioned serial killers of his day, but is also one himself, targeting scores of young blondes who he believes to be the hosts of an invisible techno-chthonic menace that only he can see. It is here in Jeremy’s insanity that he joins the ranks of other wonderful unreliable narrators such as Severian or Patrick Bateman: is Jeremy really a golden Adonis as he sees himself? Is there truly a Nanite invasion, or just a sick justification? A split personality also crops up as the assassin part of Jeremy’s mind, and this personality is so effortlessly charming that it made me wish, as I did about William Hurt’s apparition in Mr. Brooks, that it would get a lot more face time with the reader.
“You kill like a girl. Pills, Jeremy? God, pills? I’m starting to feel that my faith in you is quite misplaced. I need a Cuchulain and I get a Borgia.”
My one complaint about this bit, and quite a backhanded one at that, is that Cook’s voice in this novel is so strong (especially for what was his debut novel) that the transitions between the main character and his ‘secret sharer’ were a little too well-done. That same narrative voice makes this a wonderfully strong read, and very brisk- I read it over lunches and breaks at work and barely noticed when suddenly the book was over, and had to do a bit of a double-take. I’ve read some comments about the futuristic or experimental language of the book, but did not see much of evidence of that. The running patter in Jeremy’s head allows a graceful buildup to a nice piece of classic thriller-type climax: conveyed by Murderland’s top murder aficionado, both reader and Jeremy realize the true magnitude of his violence and its impact on the world of ‘Reap.’ Great stuff. Again the narrative voice is so strong that it tends to overwhelm the supporting characters, such as Jeremy’s girlfriend Cass. Her emergence at the end of part 1 as a ‘real person’ seemed a bit pat, but I feel that is part and parcel with transition into the action of the next part, as well as her association to the world of ‘Reap,’ as you’ll see in a minute.
If there is any part of the book you are about to read that falls even the tiniest bit flat, it is this alternate world of ‘Reap’, and I don’t think it is Cook’s fault at all. The dystopian shocker, as a genre, has a pedigree going back almost 300 years[1], but as a vital, living form of art seems to lack enough critical work being thrown at it. In Murderland serial killers are extended a sort of disability/affirmative action, that instead of causing them to be mocked as our Asperger’s sufferers are, instead are lionized by letting the basest instincts of the public run wild. This is a marvelous concept, like something Aldous Huxley would have come up with had Answer Me! been around when he was alive. We are at first presented with what could be considered the ‘world-gone-wrong’ beef and potatoes: murder-themed restaurants, gangs of people dressed like Jack the Ripper, and TV shows tracking killing instead of sports. One character immediately stands out and gives us a hint of Murderland’s depth: serpent-jawed Godless Jack, who shows the potential of combining the self-righteous killer with the bodily transgressive for maximum creepy effect.
So what part of this book gives us trouble? And just barely, because this is a great book, and perhaps only a fellow writer with a head full of philosophy and nose for the Frankfurt school would really go this far. There’s a pitfall in this fiction that needs to be explored, and I suppose instead of being bummed that I am rambling away from traditional foreword territory, Garrett Cook may be plea
sed that I am inspired by his work to tackle a new term for the genre: ‘The Reverse Uncanny Valley.’
The regular-ass Uncanny Valley is a theory, not considered scientific necessarily, that as simulacra (such as robots or CGI characters) become more realistic, human reactions to them become more favorable up to a certain point, at which point they drop off sharply. Plotted on a graph, this dip in reactions is the Valley. The commonly accepted explanation is that as more things become ‘normal,’ the details that are not are more noticeable, and the brain rejects the whole. I disagree. To me, I think that something about an almost-perfect robot causes us to consciously or unconsciously question exactly what it is that makes us human, and we can’t put our finger on it. Thus, revulsion towards the object of our existential confusion. Obviously, if you want to sell a robot or market a cartoon character, no dice. As stated in the Shrek DVD extras, they had to make Princess Fiona less beautiful, because she was creeping the animators out. In a critical view, the idea of the Uncanny Valley is not a scientific one, supportable with data, but a philosophic and methodological one: we want it to be there as part of our aesthetics; we have decided that there will be an Uncanny Valley to avoid in the creation of simulacra.
However, a sort of mirror image exists, not a precise opposite, but a complementary technique, and for a lack of better term, I’m calling it the Reverse Uncanny Valley. Perhaps something like “Cook’s Canyon” would be more appropriate- but I must confess I am hoping that Stigler’s Law of Eponymy doesn’t take hold and “Gulbranson’s Canyon” will be what future scholars call it.
So taking it as a given that there is an Uncanny Valley showcasing how little we know about what makes us human, I think there’s very strong evidence that the Reverse Valley tells us all about how our society is fucked up and staring us in the face every day. Only, no matter how weird and roundabout a way it may choose to tell us, the issues it confronts are very immediate and direct. The dystopia- the fractured place- in the future, well, it’s not in the future, and it’s revolting because we’re standing at ground zero, realizing it on the same level as staring into the soulless eyes of a robot with a sweet, fuckable body and perfect face. Take A Clockwork Orange- perhaps the most recognizable and effective piece of dystopian fiction (book and film) ever. Bowler hats and penis furniture aside, it’s really about kids talking funny, morals being challenged, the government not giving a shit about you, and violence lying in the heart of everyone. Timeless stuff, and apply it to the environment of your story, and you have dystopian lit first class. It’s going to resonate.
Don’t doubt me. I laughed when I read about the futuristic Stalin ad campaign in Terraplane, but I wasn’t laughing when I bought that bottle of black bean sauce with a dancing Stalin on it at the Russian market a month later.
Of course there’s a wide spectrum- ranging from the literary and heartbreaking Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack to Bizarro like Grape City by Kevin L. Donihe. Womack’s is the diary of a 12-year-old girl during an economic collapse, and her eventual transformation into a killer. No miracles or alternate history required. Donihe gives us a vision of a humanity so distorted that demons and devils have been brought to their knees by our perversity and brutality, and the story veers into surreal and absurd at every turn, but still shows us our true face right now.
That’s the power of dystopian fiction. Despite the trappings of a usually escapist science fiction setting, its immediacy lets us know we are somewhere between ankle-and upper lip-deep in the flood. The heavy hitters of this literature are credited with social change and literary influence unlike any other genre. Apart from the stylistic swishes I mentioned earlier (consequences of an industry-wide ignorance, and the equivalent of spiked shoulderpads in post-apocalyptic movies), Murderland shows that Garrett Cook is well on his way to being one of those heavy hitters. Protagonist Jeremy reminds us that we’re just a couple of newspaper articles away from going native wherever we are, and that is in the classic spirit of running straight down to the bottom of the Valley. Perhaps now that Cook knows why he should … maybe he’ll homestead for a while.
There aren’t many writers I’d rather have down there.
-Jess Gulbranson
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[1]
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[i]1 "The Kalama Sutta," Anguttara Nikaya 3:65
2 Treatise On Human Nature
3 "Panta rhei," Plato’s Cratylus
[ii]
[iii]4 Gulliver’s Travels was published in 1726. Close enough for government work