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From the library: David Schow’s Havoc Swims Jaded

It’s been said of Poe that no sooner had he invented the detective story than he abandoned it. The same thing might well be said for David J. Schow and “splatterpunk,” the literary subgenre he helped invent during the “horror boom” of the 1980s. Splatterpunk attempts to elicit a visceral reaction from the reader through the graphic depiction of violence — an approach that harkens back at least to the Grand Guignol of Paris and the conte cruel. But just as there is more to Robert Bloch (an author whose work Schow continues to champion) than Psycho, Schow’s work cannot be neatly pigeonholed into any single category. In a 2003 interview with Publishers Weekly, he went as far as to state that what he is most proud of regarding splatterpunk is that it earned him an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary for coining the phrase.

Schow’s most recent collection, Havoc Swims Jaded (Subterranean Press, $25), sports a title whose significance is apparently deliberately obscure and selected mostly (if not entirely) for its disquieting qualities. Disquieting is indeed the proper word to describe the fourteen stories that make up this collection. It gets off to a running start with what purports to be an editorial written for a fictional magazine by one “Bertrand Nightenhelser,” a jeremiad against conventionality and commercialism in horror publishing and ends up as a paranoid rambling whose chilling significance only becomes apparent in a footnote. This sort of indirect approach is a hallmark of Schow’s work, who demonstrates that he can do the sort of “twisting-the-knife” endings for which Bloch was renowned. “The Absolute Last of the Ultra-Spooky, Super-Scary Hallowe’en Horror Nights” deals with the unconventional response a theme park has developed in dealing with would-be vandals out to spoil their Hallowe’en programming. “Expanding Your Capabilities Using Frame/Shift™ Mode” is an ingenious and ironic look at how technology shapes how we react to reality—and perhaps how reality reacts to us. “The Five Sisters: A Fable” and “The Thing Too Hideous To Describe” are perhaps too unsubtle in their didacticism and strike me as being atypical. “Plot Twist” is a more successful example of Schow’s experimental writing; this tale of three friends stranded in the desert really takes the proverbial “left turn at Albuquerque” and provides exactly what the title promises, and then some.

Schow continues to prove himself one of the genre’s finest stylists, selecting precisely the right word for the situation described so that its emotional impact on the reader is maximized. In fact, each of the stories in this collection, the author’s seventh, manages to subvert the reader’s expectations in a manner that ratchets up the impact of the denouement by at least an order of magnitude. — Scott Connors

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