Book Review: Clump, an American Splatire

Title: Clump: an American Splatire

Author: S. Redman White

Date: 2011 

Publisher: Amazon

Quote: "Well over six feet tall even without his head...the victim was clearly some kind of monster bodybuilder."

"Splatire" is the word. This guy-type satirical novel starts out with a reporter who's never averse to flaunting any physical assets that might boost her TV career, and her most popular physical assets are "not yet covered in blood." All the main characters get hurt in a story full of violent attacks and explosions. By the end of the book they're all dead. Body parts are mentioned liberally, and a lot of them go splat.

This novel explores the question of what might happen if a man were able to survive having his head blown off the way some birds do. Like the birds, he might move, blindly, compulsively, until he dies from loss of blood. What if he doesn't die from loss of blood? What if a doctor--coasting on luck, but giving the man weekly injections of Gatorade, which he calls "Tetlowzine" and allows to be marketed as a possible cure-all--were able to stop the bleeding, restrain the patient, and...make him a star? People would be disgusted, yet fascinated, by the weird news that the patient was still alive., And what if, though unable to hear, he was able to feel rhythm and dance?

The man with only a small "clump" of neck, throat, and tongue left at the top of his muscular back, inevitably nicknamed "Clump" since nobody knows his real name, doesn't know people are there if he's not touched. He reacts violently when touched. He does a mesmerizing sort of workout-dance routine when he feels music pulsing in the floor. Thanks mainly to an incredibly tough, goodhearted little nurse ("You and what army?" someone taunts her. "The Israeli army," she snaps back after using one of the martial arts moves she learned there) and a self-parodic but even more goodhearted orderly, Clump stays muscular, alternately straining against restraints and dancing, until he becomes a valuable commodity and things start to go wrong.

Very bad things happen to people in this novel. Worse things happen to women than to men, especially to the nurse, who deserves more than just a few chances to take violent revenge on people who've done her wrong, and the hospital's lawyer, who deserves what she gets but it seems to me that the author is enjoying the sadism too much anyway. The consensual sex scenes in this book are somewhat sadistic, too, with handprints and broken teeth and so on. Most of the sex acts are clearly identified as a kind that's now favored as being "safe" (at least from causing pregnancy, if not from spreading diseases) but used to be illegal in several States. But men get maimed and killed too; the older men on the hospital board barely survive one encounter with Clump, a rather likable orderly gets the same life-threatening injury over and over until he fades out of the story, and though he skates for far too long Dr. Tetlow gets a fate guy readers clearly see as worse than theirs. 

If gore and squick bother you, if your brain engages any mirror neurons in reading about bleeding shoulder sockets from which arms have been torn out instead of reading that sort of thing as a metaphor, you will not like this book. Don't read it. If you can read stomach-turning violence as metaphor, this book will reward you with laugh-out-loud zingers that show that the author doesn't need all the gore to make his satirical points.

Probably very few aunts will admit having enjoyed this novel, but I did. I might have liked it more if there'd been more scenes where corporate vice-presidents don't know where Power Point presentations come from relative to the number of scenes where people get "accidentally" tasered until their "teeth beat a tattoo on the table," but it's been thirteen years. What White's written, he's written.

The writer known as S. Redman White also blogs as Stilton Jarlsberg. His blog is often funny. His polished, revised comedy is funnier, in between the gross-outs.