Slob by Rex Miller

He will take the woman and the child down into the special place he's made for them in a water main.  And that is where he will summon the know-it-all cop, and we'll see how he likes it when he comes down to get his whore and the brat, see how he likes it in the secret subworld.  

You may recall that we recently read one of the famous Paperbacks from Hell and found within it many ads for other horror novels.  One of them, 1987's Slob by Rex Miller, was actually praised by none other than enfant terrible and critical darling Harlan Ellison.  A British 1988 edition of the novel, complete with Stephen King blurb on the cover, is available at the internet archive, offering us cheapos a chance to see if the book really does "smoke" and "pull a plow" as Ellison claims in the hilarious name-dropping endorsement emblazoned on the special advance copy used to advertise the book to retailers.

The prologue, one page long, which in the middle of the novel we realize is a "flash forward," introduces us to the title slob, a man almost 500 lbs in weight who smells horrible, has killed hundreds of people, and bears the nickname "Chaingang," I guess because he often kills people with a chain and is so huge he's like a one-man gang.  Already on the first page I was shaking my head over one of Miller's word choices: he writes "...sink a sharp object into her throat, ripping down across the breasts and then the abdomen...." and I am thinking "across" is wrong--to me, "across the breasts" would be a horizontal path from one breast to the other.  Doesn't Miller mean "between" the breasts?  (This kind of thing happens only seldomly in the novel, so it is bad luck one of these blunders occurs right there at the starting gate.)

Slob is 301 pages long, which sounds forbidding, but a sizable fraction of that page count is empty space.  For example, the one-page prologue starts in the middle of page 7 and ends in the middle of page 8.  There are 27 chapters, and they are not numbered but instead have prosaic titles, typically the names of the characters who figure in them.  Each chapter gets a full title page on an odd-numbered page and is followed by a blank even-numbered page, so we have over 54 pages without actual narrative text right there.  When a chapter ends on an odd-numbered page it is followed by a blank even-numbered page, yielding many more blank pages.  And of course every chapter starts in the middle of a page, and many of them end in the upper half of a page.  Probably this thing is actually only about 210 pages of text.

Ellison's praise, in the ad in my printing of Stage Fright by Garrett Boatman and on the cover of that promo edition of Slob, is pretty vague, but it seems Ellison with his barrage of bombast is trying to convince us that it is Miller's writing that is remarkable.  And Miller's themes and style do at times remind us of Ellison's own work; the brand names, the references to celebrities, the sneering at American culture--for example, we get the repeated suggestion that Vietnamese communists are better soldiers than Americans as well as the tired observation that American cheese isn't really cheese.  I find that reading much of Ellison's writing feels not like being immersed in a believable world but like being yelled at by a smartass and Miller himself sometimes gives us a little taste of that feeling when he puts words in all caps to emphasize them

If a more powerful mind, a masterful and dominant intelligence, decides you will do something, you will accede to the wishes of the greater being.  Because you are SHEEP.

or somewhat incongruously addresses us readers directly, as when capping off a jokey comment about our protagonist being satiated sexually with "folks" 

His crankcase was empty, folks.

or when describing the duffel bag Chaingang carries around with him, the one full of fragmentation grenades, claymore mines, crowbars, lock picks, etc.  Three or four times Miller reminds us that "neither you nor I could lift" or "budge," the bag, and he has a few metaphors that  he likewise resorts to again and again, saying Chaingang's fingers are like cigars half a dozen times (at least) and using electricity as a metaphor to describe the feeling of love or lust between the hero and heroine at least three times.

All these elements of Miller's writing serve to remind you this is a book, and a somewhat silly one, taking you out of the story and making it harder to care about the characters, to deplore their evil or sympathize with their plights.  But on the whole Miller's writing is competent, and I appreciate how he employs a diversity of styles that add variety and interest to the book, making the chapters distinct based on who is in them and what is happening to them.    

The first chapter is written conventionally in the third-person past tense, and in it we get to know one of our three main characters, Edie Lynch, an attractive middle-aged woman, mother of an eight-year-old daughter, Lee.  Her husband was murdered by Chaingang and found with his heart missing--the press has dubbed the perpetrator "the Lonely Hearts Killer" because Chaingang often, though not always, rips out his victims' hearts.

The chapters focusing on Chaingang are often written in the present tense and feature feverish stream of consciousness passages consisting of long ungrammatical and punctuation-light sentences that offer the point of view of the gargantuan and nauseous killer as he busts into some random family's home to torture, kill and mutilate them with a chain and a bowie knife or commit some similar mayhem, or fantasizes about or recalls some episode of murderous violence.  The second chapter takes this form.  Our third chapter starts in the first-person past tense in the voice of the novel's hero, Jack Eichord, a middle-aged alcoholic detective.  That first-person section is about Jack's alcoholism and recovery--he's been off the sauce nine years.  The rest of the chapter consists of a third-person section about how Jack is one of the best cops in America, a specialist in catching serial killers who is not as corrupt or vulgar and low class as most cops.

Chaingang and Jack are superlatives or archetypes, like comic book characters, each the best in his business, one an evil genius single-mindedly devoted to killing people for kicks, Earth's greatest predator, the other the rare honest man in government who is single-mindedly devoted to catching serial killers. Our third main character, Edie Lynch, is similarly a sort of Platonic exemplar of her type, Miller telling us she is "one of those rare creatures who didn't have an insincere or mean or malicious or selfish bone in her body." The characters in Slob are kind of childish, and Miller doesn't just sketch them out and then make the plot the focus of his writing; instead, he makes the characters the focus of the book and spends long paragraphs describing their lives, their thoughts, their physical appearances (we get a lot of sentences about how obese Chaingang is, descriptions of his rolls of fat and so forth.) This is OK for Chaingang, because he is over-the-top strange and disgusting, which is entertaining, but the descriptions of Jack and Edie can be boring--do we really need to hear about how much Jack likes the smell of a long list of different types of liquor (smell is very important to this book) or about Edie's volunteer work at a runaway hotline?

The first third of the book acquaints us with the three main characters.  In the novel's fourth chapter Miller offers a detailed description (in past tense this time, perhaps because we are privy to the victim's thoughts) of how Chaingang expertly kidnaps a woman with the aim of raping her, employing psychological strategies as well as brutal violence.  When things go wrong (she reflexively bites him you-know-where) Chaingang kills the woman.  Then he kills a guy who is just driving by.  We learn Chaingang's backstory in broad outlines here and we get a lot of detail later, how he has a genius IQ, was abused as a child, has been in many mental institutions and was released by the Pentagon to participate in an experimental project in Vietnam, serving in a behind-enemy-lines assassination squad.  He made it back to the US through his own ingenuity and since then has been eluding capture as he kills one person after another for the fun of it.  Besides being super smart and super strong, Chaingang is a "precognate" who has what amount to psychic powers--Miller tells us he benefits from "biochemical phenomena that transcend the mechanistic laws of kinesiology and kinetics" and later refers to Chaingang's abilities as a "sixth sense," and, more expansively, explains that the killer is "a human data-processing tool."  Over the course of the book Chaingang's mental powers sense human life nearby, detect the depth of water, and warn him of approaching danger.  He also has a kind of rapport with the natural world, loves trees, plants, and small animals--Miller even uses the hackneyed phrases "at one with the terrain" and "in harmony with nature" to describe this man who lives to kill his fellow man.

We also get chapters about the relatively boring Jack and Edie and near the end of the first third of Slob the detective stuff begins in earnest as Jack and other cops investigate Chaingang's recent murders, talking to witnesses and looking for fingerprints and all that.

Now that we are familiar with them, in the middle third of the book, our three principles start interacting with each other.  Jack meets Edie and her daughter while seeking previously overlooked clues, and the two fall in love, and we get some long-winded descriptions of the lovers' thoughts as their relationship blossoms.  The unusual sex in this book isn't limited to the rape and sexual abuse that Chaingang suffered as a child and metes out to women as an ogrish adult--initially Edie doesn't want to have sexual intercourse with Jack and after jerking him off a few times introduces panty hose and Vaseline to their bedroom activities.

The perhaps tedious middle-aged dating experience chapters are interrupted by scenes in Chicago in which Chaingang murders an old rich lawyer and book collector, robs a store, makes friends with abandoned puppies, and reminisces about torturing a woman and about his adventures in Vietnam--Chaingang's setting up shop under the streets of Chicago (Miller seems to elide any distinction between the Windy City's sewers, water mains, and storm drains) is foreshadowed as Chaingang recalls exploring Viet Cong tunnels, some of the entrances to which lie under the surfaces of bodies of water.  Edie actually sees Chaingang climbing down a manhole into the sewer, not realizing she is watching the man who killed her husband two years ago, the man her boyfriend is trying to find.

A theme of Slob is of an America in decline, an America that is corrupt--in the first half of the book we get references to Americans' poor diet, the Vietnam War, Watergate, police corruption and incompetence. As the second half of the novel begins Miller spends several pages on scenes dramatizing police and government deception of the public, a sequence preceded by Jack's ruminations on how much "clout" the police have in various locales across the US ("...there was one notorious area of New Jersey where a badge was an absolute license to kill....") One center of police malfeasance he specifically names is Cook County, Illinois, which wikipedia tells me is the county in which Chicago resides! And sure enough, the Chicago PD, having captured a murderer, tries to convince the public that they have found the famous serial killer who is slaughtering people and tearing out their hearts, even though they all know the guy they caught is just some copycat small timer. The police commissioner even makes Jack go on a local TV talk show to spread this lie over the airwaves, and Miller, who had a successful career in broadcasting (says the author's bio in this UK copy of Slob,) spills a lot of ink describing how a live TV show operates. As with the middle-aged romance chapters, I was kind of wondering if this kind of material was why I was reading Slob, but I guess it fits in to the America-is-corrupt theme, pushing the idea that TV is an addictive scam. Anyway, Chaingang sees the broadcast on the set of a family he has just slaughtered and whose bodies he proceeds to mutilate in so outrageous a fashion that when a relative finds them she is driven insane by the sight of their mangled bodies and her hair instantly goes white. (As with Chaingang's psychic powers, this adds a note of hard-to-swallow fantasy to the more or less realistic novel.)

Interestingly, like the America depicted in this novel, Chaingang himself is also in decline; whereas in the past he used his super brain to clear his tracks and make sure no clues were left at the scene of his atrocities, nowadays he is getting negligent, and even allows a victim--one of two drug-dealing bikers he attacks from behind--to escape, even starts taunting the police, mailing to Jack the hearts of some of his victims.

In the final third of Slob, our guy Jack gets a fingerprint of Chaingang and uses his connections in Washington to get Chaingang's name and photo.  At the same time, Chaingang learns from a newspaper story that Jack has taken up with the widow of one of his earlier victims--the local journalos helpfully include a photo of Edie.  When Edie sees the photo of the man who murdered her husband she recognizes him as the man she saw go down a manhole, and Jack and the cops begin exploring the sewers, not that they actually find their quarry.  (One of the problems with Slob is that Jack and the cops don't do very interesting or impressive detective work.)

Edie is not the only person to have seen Chaingang entering the sewers; a thief and drug addict known as Woody Woodpecker and his "bag lady" girlfriend have also seen the killer, and WW tells Leroy AKA Dr. Geronimo, an obese African-American quack and recreational drug user who sells herbs and potions and claims to know voodoo and the magic of the Comanches, a man whom Miller describes in ways that today might not be permissible ("fat, black buck...approximately shape and hue of a cannonball*") all about it.  Hoping for a hefty reward, this comedy duo visits the home base of the drug-dealing biker gang to tell them they know where the giant who killed their comrade makes his lair.  We get a series of scenes of all these lower class criminals negotiating over prices and making fun of each other, Miller providing goofy names, personalities, vocabularies and pronunciations for each of them, creating an entire human scum milieu and playing the whole thing for laughs.  

*Over a 13-page span, Miller says Dr. Geronimo looks like a cannonball five times.    

We get a flashback to Vietnam, a present tense description of Chaingang, a one-man long range patrol squad, laying an ambush and springing it on a squad of North Vietnamese regulars, the obese killer employing grenades, claymores, an M60 machine gun and of course the chain he favors in hand-to-hand combat to wipe them out.  The very next chapter, again in present tense, relates the invasion of the sewers by nineteen bikers; Chaingang has set a variety of explosive traps, much like back in the Vietnamese jungle twenty or twenty-five years ago, and the bikers are annihilated in a huge explosion. 

This whole biker episode is not really connected to the Jack and Edie characters and doesn't do anything to advance the main plot but is probably the most entertaining portion of the novel, Woody Woodpecker and Dr. Geronimo (who survive) being sort of amusing and the ambush of the NVA squad being a decent action scene; it doesn't hurt that I don't mind seeing communist guerillas and drug dealers getting blown up (in contrast to seeing innocent families mutilated and innocent women sexually assaulted.)

In the last fifteen pages of text, Chaingang expertly kidnaps Edie and Lee and contacts Jack.  Jack meets Chaingang at a manhole cover and uses Chaingang's weakness--his love of small animals--against the killer to rescue the hostages and shoot Chaingang multiple times.  The final confrontation is wrapped up very quickly, with no long drawn out chase or fight or negotiation.  Chaingang's body vanishes down into the sewer or storm drain system, leaving us readers to wonder if this novel is supernatural enough to suspect Chaingang has survived and will return for a sequel.  There do seem to be additional books starring Jack Einhorn, and additional books starring Chaingang (including comic books!), but whether they take place before or after Slob and whether these two figures appear in any of them together, I can't tell.  

I am not sure whether I should grade Slob as acceptable or marginally good.  Most of the actual Chaingang passages are entertaining, and the Dr. Geronimo stuff is fun.  The Jack and Edie and Lee parts are not good but they are more or less competent--they are not annoying at least.  The plot is weak--the novel is a series of episodes that are not closely integrated with each other and there is little sense of rising tensions that lead to a climax and there is no feeling of catharsis at the end.  I don't regret reading Slob, but I won't be reading any more Chaingang or Eichord novels any time soon.