The Running of Beasts by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg

"The whole point of the crimes is to attract attention, to convince himself of his own reality.  Since he hasn't been caught yet, he'll keep on doing it until he is, until he's discovered, and in the process discovers himself, finds out who he is."

Hey, blood fans, let's read a "superb suspense thriller" that has an ending that the Albany newspaper called "a smasher" and was written by our hero Barry N. Malzberg in collaboration with his pal, critically-acclaimed detective novelist Bill Pronzini.  At the internet archive we find a scan of a 1976 paperback edition of The Running of Beasts with a red woman-in-peril cover painting by Jerome Podwil; that is what I'll be reading today, but all you collectors out there can pick up one of the numerous paperback copes for sale on e-bay--if Jerome Podwil ain't your cup of meat, there is a 2012 edition with a skull on it and a 1988 Black Lizard printing whose cover illo highlights the role of newspapers in the story.  

Barry and Bill start off their 300-page novel cleverly, with a typescript draft of a newspaper story about the three recent murders of women in the decaying Adirondack town of Bloodstone, NY.  Written by Jack Cross in a bizarrely  unjournalistic and solipsistic style, the draft is covered in handwritten corrections and notes from Cross's editor, Henry Plummer, owner of the local weekly paper, so not only fills us readers in on the background of the murder spree but on Cross's immature personality, parlous career and unhappy relationship with his colleagues.  This is followed by a police report and then a letter from young up-and-coming New York City journalist Valerie Broome to a magazine editor, proposing she write a story on the Bloodstone murders.  She tells the editor that she is specially equipped to handle the story because 1) she grew up in Bloodstone, a town she says has a resident population of less than 500 people--people who are small-minded bigots who hate outsiders, the poor, blacks, and homosexuals, and 2) she knows a headshrinker, Dr. James Ferrara, who has a theory about the killer--that the killer is insane and doesn't even know he is the killer, but commits the murders while in a sort of trance or "amnesiac fugue."

Broome and Ferrara leave New York City and head up to Bloodstone where we get to know the various characters.  We got Cross the young journalist who collects Superman comics, doesn't get along with his mother (who is sleeping with his boss, Plummer), and hopes to write a book on the murders that will make him rich and famous.  There's Constable Alex Keller, the only cop in town, a veteran of the Chicago police force with whom he lost his job for beating up a '68 convention protester.  There's former actor and recovering alcoholic Steven Hook, who has been making his living for six years betting on the horses.  Rounding out our four lead male characters is State Police Lieutenant Daniel Smith, who is in charge of the murder investigation, has some kind of stomach ailment, and shares with Plummer a love of baseball trivia.

Over the first half of the novel we learn these four guys'  histories, idiosyncrasies and neuroses, and observe as they each inch closer to personal breakdowns.  Hook's system of betting on the horses is failing and he is losing money instead of making it, and considers turning back to drink to ease his anxiety.  Cross is a premature ejaculator who is so obsessed with Superman that he calls his girlfriend "Lois" while he is fucking her and yet she still nags him to marry her.  Keller is obsessed with finding the killer and so he can't leave town to patronize a prostitute, which means he is getting uncomfortably horny.  Smith's stomach problem (probably an ulcer) is getting worse and he can't talk to his fat wife about this or any other of his problems and he can't get along with Keller either.  All four of these guys are alienated, have sexual performance issues, have suffered blackouts or delusions or fits of violent rage in the past, and each has the feeling that some woman has damaged his life, making them all--in the eyes of the reader--suspects.

We also learn all about Valerie Broome's personality and background; she is the most sympathetic and admirable character in the novel; as a sensitive and and good-looking woman who has achieved success in her field of journalism, she is the one lead character who doesn't feel like a villain or a loser.  Broome seems to represent the authors' attitudes, to voice their concerns--an educated big city resident who is concerned about all the isms and looks down on small town America, she sees Bloodstone as a 

microcosm...of what is going on in America today...assassinations, mass murders, public freakouts, private collapses, television spectaculars, grand funerals, small griefs, dead politicians, living politicians who are dead...a pressure point where modern technology and alienated man are forced at last to meet each other.

Hook discovers the body of the fourth victim, and is shaken, and Broome starts an affair with him; it is suggested in part because she feels sorry for him--as a sensitive soul, Hook's suffering melts her heart.  Hook is probably the character second most sympathetic and second most like the authors; for one thing, his theater background offers Bill and Barry opportunities to talk about Shakespeare and Victor Hugo and James Agee ("the running of beasts" is apparently a quote from Agee's corpus.)  Keller is the most openly villainous character; an obsessive man who is hostile to everybody and in particular complains about liberals and homosexuals, he competes with the state police effort to the catch the killer instead of cooperating with it, and suspects Hook and relentlessly pursues him, to the point of illegally harassing him, even though he lacks any real evidence.  As for Smith, the authors use him to illustrate the human struggle to believe that the universe is orderly and logic and reason can describe it when everything feels chaotic and seems inexplicable.

He could, would, overcome all of these obstacles with patience and absolute confidence in the ordered universe--but how long would it take?  And how many more obstacles would there be before methodology finally took him to the truth?

In the middle of the book, Cross's mother Florence reports that she has been attacked, and then Cross's girlfriend, Paula the schoolteacher, informs him she is pregnant and demands he marry her--Cross wants her to have an abortion ("Everything's legal in New York now") but she refuses:

"No.  Abortion's a sin, it's murder.  I won't murder a helpless infant."

"Embryo," Cross said.  "Fetus."  

"I won't do it," she said flatly.

One of the reasons we read old books is because they offer insight into life and thought in the past.  This passage in which James Cross and Paula Eaton discuss abortion is interesting because we all know how good liberals like Malzberg are required to feel about abortion nowadays, but almost fifty years ago he and Pronzini are putting the "it's just a clump of cells" rationalizations into the mouth of a character who is irresponsible and delusional and deploying the abortion issue as a strategy of hinting to the reader that Cross might be the murderer because he is quite comfortable with killing the weak and innocent.  From the perspective of 2023, this somewhat ambiguous, perhaps hostile, view of abortion sits uncomfortably with all the complaints that rural white people are violent racists and homophobes that are sprinkled throughout the book. 

Speaking of dim views of rural white, the townspeople become angry at the authorities for their failure to stop the killings, and there is some talk among them of setting up a vigilante patrol; Broome compares some raucous attendees of a town meeting to a lynch mob, and, when an ordinary citizen tries to catch the killer himself he only causes more trouble for everybody.    

The last third or so of the book starts with a good chase scene set during a night thunderstorm which starts with poor Paula being murdered and then sees Keller and Smith independently chasing down Hook; Smith has a life-threatening ulcer attack during this caper and it is Keller who arrests Hook, but he has to hand him over to the state police and so can't fulfill his dream of confining him in his own local jail.  Cross, following Keller in his role of investigative reporter, witnesses Smith's collapse and Hook's arrest--this scene, which brings all four of our suspects together, foreshadows the novel's climactic scene in which they will be reunited in even more dangerous circumstances.

An interesting theme that dominates the portion of the novel between this chase scene and the climactic chase concerns parallel psychological crises suffered by Florence Cross and Valerie Broome.  Florence wrestles with her belief that her son James is the killer, while Broome struggles with her own suspicion Steven Hook, her new boyfriend, is the killer--each finds the idea that a murderer of women was inside her--as a baby in the Cross case and as a sex partner in Valerie's case--morbidly fascinating and so horrifying they strive to refuse to believe it.  Also adding to the tension in this stretch is the evolution of Smith, who previously has been the most normal, the most reliable, of our four male leads.  Gradually he begins to act recklessly and erratically, to, under the pressure of his ulcer and his desperation to catch the killer, take on some of the unhealthy character traits of Cross (whereas Cross sometimes wonders how Clark Kent would handle a situation, Smith begins using baseball analogies to guide his decision-making) and Keller (like the Constable, Smith becomes determined to solve the case himself without the help of other cops.)  

In the novel's climax, after a chase involving boats as well as cars, Valerie, Hook, Smith, Keller and Cross all end up in a sort of amusement park slash museum fashioned to look like a colonial fort and village and full of mannequins in 18th-century garb--Pronzini and Malzberg's novel is about how terrible (rural) America is, and so the final explosion is set in a sort of caricatured archetypal (frontier) American setting.  The action climax in this ersatz fort stresses how similar the four men are, how each of them might have been the killer--the novel is also about how everybody (at least every man) is terrible.  One of our four suspects, totally insane, declares himself to be the killer and commits suicide in the fort.  In the epilogue that follows the other three experience dreadful fates--one goes insane, one dies, and one--the real killer--murders Valerie Broome.

As you probably already know if you are reading my blog, Barry Malzberg was a science fiction fan who aspired to be a serious mainstream literary writer like John Updike or Saul Bellow or Vladimir Nabokov but couldn't achieve his career goals in the shrinking mainstream literary market and so sold stories and novels to the SF market about abnormal psychology, sexual dysfunction, and the social dysfunction of post-JFK America by setting them in an SF context, this context sometimes being a pretty thin veneer.  In The Running of Beasts we see Malzberg working out his typical themes in a different genre framework, the serial killer thriller mold, describing four different male characters who are alienated and sexually dysfunctional and share or illustrate interests of Malzberg's--betting on the horses, struggling to succeed as a writer, a fascination with political violence, and a commitment to literature and the fine arts.  

The Running of Beasts succeeds as a Malzberg novel, and I am giving it a thumbs up--James Cross in particular, the talentless confessional writer who never stops thinking of Superman, has delusions he is going to win a Pulitzer Prize and get lots of chicks, can't satisfy his girlfriend in bed and treats her like crap out of bed, and has a creepy relationship with his mother, is a classic Malzberg protagonist whom Barry's fans will appreciate.

But does The Running of Beasts succeed as a horror novel or a detective novel?  Malzberg's work often employs experimental techniques and often lacks traditional literary and entertainment values like vivid descriptions or a strong plot that moves logically from point A to point B, and thus much of Malzberg's work can be hard to follow, but, probably because of Pronzini's involvement, The Running of Beasts is very clear and straightforward in its descriptions and in the way its narrative operates; the characters' personalities and motives all are easily discernible and the plot functions conventionally, with a beginning, middle, climax, resolution, and then twist ending that clues you in unambiguously as to what was really going on.  The two chase scenes are good.  On those bases the novel has to be counted a success as a mainstream popular entertainment.  However, gorehounds should be forewarned that the novel features less blood and guts (though far more gastrointestinal distress) than I expected, and mystery fans should know there was less detection jazz than I expected, and the detective stuff that is present is a debunking of the idea that the detective can, via logic and intelligence, figure out whodunit and achieve justice--any clues anybody discovers they discover by accident, the authorities and sympathetic characters never figure out who the criminal is and never catch him, and the sympathetic characters all get killed or driven bonkers.  Smith, a man committed to police techniques and methodologies, learns to his dismay that the world is not orderly and man cannot master it--our lives are chaos, our goals are beyond our grasp, and we are likely to suffer death or madness at any moment.

As for weaknesses, some people might find the passages that consist of 1930s baseball trivia or of a detailed description of horse betting strategy too long, and I admit they were mostly Greek to me.  Another issue is the fact that the way Ferrara accurately diagnoses the killer's neuroses from reading newspaper reports is hard to believe, and undermines the novel's theme that the universe is inexplicable chaos that experts cannot penetrate any more deeply than can ordinary schlubs.  These are minor issues, though.

A satisfying entry in the Malzberg oeuvre, and one that (probably because of Pronzini's contributions) presents Malzberg's customary themes in an easy-to-read form.  A Malzberg book that it is easy to recommend to all genre fiction fans.