Our “hero” Felix Soandso traverses a nightmarish acid-scape of Middle America in the town of Dreamfield, an otherwise laconic Hell-hole standing in for the worst qualities of conspicuous consumption and systemic ignorance in the good ole’ US of A. It’s difficult to call Felix a protagonist, more so just a character caught up in a collage of ultraviolence that borders on the poetic. His antithesis comes in the form of Samson Thataway, (or perhaps Samson is just a purer embodiment of the population of Dreamfield). Thataway is the Man in uber-black leading a band of not only blood thirsty,but blood-parched, clone-like men on a homicidal death trip. He and the Fuming Garcias “suck[s] the meat out of life and crap[s] it into a dirty ashtray.” Computer Cleanser addicted, decayed and homicidal, Samson has come to town as an almighty unholy flood of flesh rending and tissue tearing rape-o-matic terror. Felix Soandso’s “lover” Helen is caught in the flood of Samson and his men and it’s then up to Felix to exact retribution. Or perhaps not.
Meanwhile all around them society loses its collective shit as nature conspires against them, hogs are torn in two by hand and wave after wave after wave after wave of gun shot, chainsaw, and knife wound victims succumb to the darkest parts of the human psyche.
Peckinpah is written with the frenetic pace of a schizoid-savant cranked on dexedrine driving an alcohol fueled funny car across the Nevada salt flats while attempting to make a collage out of pornography, Intouch magazine and stills from 30 years of ultra-violent Horror and Western films. This shortish (coming in at 115 pages) burst of excess teems with sensual text that drips like the sweat of the back of a pervert in a Bangkok whorehouse. Words are strung together like the infinite mass of billboards that run and dot the highways and by-ways of America and we pass them in picoseconds hardly absorbing much more than a greasy smile across the lips of a buxom young co-ed. For Wilson, it’s A-more-ica. A place of filth and dollar stores and “8lb bowel movements.”
The only issues this reader took with the work were the digressions into critical film analysis. The examination of Peckinpah’s influence on film as taken from Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies, by Stephen Prince was unnecessary. If the author doesn’t need to explain in text film and culture references, then the reader should be left to glean information from the fucking title and do a little leg-work of her own and find out just who the Hell Sam – Fucking – Peckinpah was. I’m glad Wilson is such a fan but this was an example where his academic background was an unnecessary hindrance on the work as a whole.
In the end, the book is an acid soaked ride through America’s filthy billboard mass consumption heartlands on the back of a souped up chainsaw and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in literature on the edge, taking up space usually left for drunken angry desperate film-makers of the late 1970s and early 80′s.
Go here for more on D. Harlan Wilson
- Willie
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