After 105 books with very few real stinkers, I have to pick this one off the shelf because it looked short enough to finish
I hadn't counted on it being such a difficult read.
it's truly one of those books that when you put it down you can't pick it up again.
I don't know if I managed to find some kind of unedited and unformatted first draft but this was littered with grammar and formatting errors. Capital letters are used throughout where italics would make the point much better without shouting at the reader. One page has a third of the lines ending only halfway across the page, despite the
sentences not actually
finishing at the end
of those lines, whole
paragraphs that just weren't
formatted in the slightest.
If that wasn't bad enough, the book is overwritten to the point of parody. I don't know if Miller was aiming at a so bad it's funny prose, but he only managed the first part of the phrase if he was.
The plot, if I give it that much dignity, is a serial killer loose on and under the streets of Chicago. Known as either Chaingang or Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski, he's a 450lb monster, who, depending on the needs of the plot, either stinks so badly that people know he's there by the smell minutes before they see him, or he's able to quietly sneak up on them, He's simultaneously a genius and retarded and he's apparently killed more people than anyone else on the face of the planet.
Against him is the cop Jack Eichord. Eichord is introduced in a chapter that starts with first person narrative. Miller gets bored of the first person voice after a few pages and slips back into the fourth-wall breaking omniscient third person that had been used in previous chapters and is used for the rest of the book.
Eichord is an ex-alcoholic and apparently a great detective. Not that he does much detecting in this book. he spends most of his time in a cringeworthy romance with the widow of one of Chaingang's first victims in Chicago.
The chapters written from Chaingang's POV are written in a stream of consciousness that reads like a very slightly more literate version of Nickolaus Pacione (if you don't know who he is, google some of his writing - but probably best for your sanity if you don't. Suffice to say it's very very very bad indeed). Even the Eichord chapters were scattered with casual racism and similarly dodgy material - one of his chapters begins in a bar with three pages of fellow cops trading racist jokes.
Most of the on the page killings are gratuitously misogynistic and rapey. If he kills a man, it's described very briefly. When women die, we're treated to torture, mutilation and rape first, all in the horribly overwritten style.
This is a writer trying his hardest to shock by writing gore and torture and generally just being edgy with no thought to how to frame a narrative or indeed a readable sentence.
I was very close to calling this my first DNF since I started this blog. I'm almost disappointed that I didn't . I'll leave you with a sample of his deathless prose, this describes the last moments of one of the many very poorly characterised shreddies.
Still and all, wouldn't that be the last straw? To be mugged out here on the street during his constitutional. Dying of goddamn cancer and get mugged. More than a body could stand. He decided to head back to the apartment and about that time a bright silver thing sliced out at him slashing out of nowhere and the phrase "nuncuperative will and testament" darted past his consciousness as he tried to curse this thing but the blood from his severed throat stopped this last obloquy of thought in a bright red, surprisingly hot spurt as his heart pumped valiantly pumping his life force out into the darkened street.
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