God Laughs When You Die by Michael Boatman

I have no idea whether or not God Laughs When You Die, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she allowed herself a wry grimace after reading Michael Boatman’s first collection of stories. The subheading, Mean Little Stories from the Wrong Side of the Tracks, accurately reflects both their mood and origin—cynical, grotesque, and sometimes hilarious in their depictions of a bizarre assortment of individuals trying to make sense of their inverted, nightmarish worlds.

Take Rufus Bleak, for example, the protagonist of “The Long, Lost Life of Rufus Bleak.” A one time preacher, Bleak witnessed his wife’s rape and murder before being shot and left for dead by a bunch of Ku Klux Klansmen. Only Bleak didn’t die. His salvation—and I’m not sure that’s the correct term in this case—comes at the hands of an entity called the Night Mother who chooses Bleak for a very special purpose. For the next one hundred years, his disembodied spirit is forced to reside in the bodies of terminally ill men until dragged out and hurled into stronger, meaner vessels, unwitting agents of the Night Mother’s desire for blood and death. In this, Bleak is something of a distant cousin to Dexter, Showtime’s eponymous forensic expert-cum-serial killer, minus the wit and charm, but double the burden of angst and guilt. Bleak’s purpose, like Dexter’s, appears to be to take out child-killers, rapists, and various other examples of human scum, but the truth, as he comes to realize, is a little more unsavory. So Bleak wants out, but the only exit is death, and the Night Mother is reluctant to release her prime agent.

Demented is the word that best describes “The Last American President,” only here I use the term as a compliment. While Bleak’s tale was relentlessly grim, this equally violent story of the “End Days” is leavened by a crazed vein of black humour; it’s as if Joe Lansdale buddied up with J. G. Ballard, and the two of them washed down some peyote with moonshine whiskey by way of preparing to rewrite the script of Mars Attacks! The story takes the form of the last US president’s final diary entry following the invasion of Earth by a race of piratical murderers, the Vox Mortis, or Voice of Death. While his entire cabinet and other world leaders fall prey to the horrors inflicted by these demons—getting eaten by your own intestines or turning into a saber-toothed tiger and chewing off the arm of vice president Joan Collins—only the president himself seems to have the cojones to stand up to the Vox. Even the sight of a female Vox “performing an act of double penetration on the Washington Monument,” causes no more than a polite nod to “Christian decency.” As the President readies himself for the final showdown, Boatman bombards us with an array of increasingly grotesque metaphors. Try this one, explaining the President’s decision to outlaw outdoor exercise:

“I mean by 1989 the air and water were so bad that anyone without nose, lung and rectal filters stood about as much chance of escaping a life threatening disease as a crack whore working an AIDS camp at Chernobyl.”

Restraint is not something that appears in Boatman’s literary armoury, nor is he concerned with notions of taste or political correctness. The American Dream, religion, consumerism, TV, gangstas, rednecks, and Hollywood are all fair game, but the cumulative affect of this scattergun approach tends to deaden the reader’s nerves. The stories that work best are those where Boatman is clearly focused on a specific target, as in “Folds.” The narrator, the producer of The Morrie Stapler Show—think Jerry Springer but without the class—becomes haunted by the gaze of the mother of a recent guest, Mohammed “Chun King” Jefferson, a 120-pound five-year old. The producer is wise to the nature of this kind of entertainment: getting folk to degrade themselves on TV for “a rabid national audience.” Though he is responsible for booking the fat kid as fodder for the freak show, he’s touched by the mother’s painful honesty as she explains to the hectoring Morrie, that she is, despite what everyone thinks, a good mother. A bizarre encounter with mother and son after the show reveals something odd and disturbing about their relationship, forcing the producer to question who is in control. He promises to help the woman, only this time it’s more than the usual pre-show platitudes. Ultimately, this promise leads him down a dark, twisted road to a place where the exploited, led by Chun King, turn the tables on the regular, “normal” people who make up the show’s audience. The story succeeds in making the reader complicit with Morrie Stapler’s audience, enticing us to want to see more of the human freak show that is Chun King. But Boatman gives us something else, something both shocking and pathetic that makes us think about the real human cost of such “entertainment.”

“The Tarantula Memoirs” owes something to George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series and more than a little to Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Jack Greer, aka The Tarantula, is a retired superhero slowly dying of radiation poisoning. An old ally, Prometheus, interrupts Jack’s reminisces to enlist his help in taking down Oberon, a former superhero colleague gone rogue. Greer strikes the reader as a man acutely aware of the absurdity of being a superhero. Like Moore’s The Owl, the notion of secret identities and costumes seems ridiculous, the stuff of, well, comics. But Greer is a painter and performance artist, and it’s this aspect of his persona that allows him to relish playing the “role” of the Tarantula. It’s a knowing and affectionate take on the world of superhero comics, albeit one that might work better at greater length.

In “Katchina,” Leona Brinkmore discovers something awful about her husband, and though initially in denial, on the prompting of a dozen of Lester’s victims, she finally decides to stand up to him. As in quite a few of the stories, Boatman has two narrative strands running alongside each other. Echoing Leona’s desperate attempts to come to terms with Lester’s true nature is Ivy Horse’s struggle to take revenge on her murderer. Though allowing us to understand Ivy’s motives, the device robs the story of tension, as we’re never really in doubt about the outcome.

“The Drop” offers more surprises, though it is again, essentially a tale of revenge. Here, Cy Biggs and Buster Plump are engaged in a comical duel over the latter’s wife, Moniqua. The story takes place on a small fishing boat out on a lake, with neither man aware of the others’ intention. Right at the moment when Cy is about to stave in Buster’s head, a mermaid intervenes. There’s also a particularly malicious catfish by the name of Stanky Methusaleh who functions like a poor man’s Moby Dick. It’s all pretty comical in a gruesome kind of way, as is “Bloodbath at Landsdale Towers,” but by this stage, the descriptions of carnage and mayhem seem to serve only to show off Boatman’s skill in creating elaborately disgusting metaphors, as when he describes life in the story’s locale as being:

“as pleasant as crawling through the anal-tract of a rabid she-moose at the height of mating season.”

I’m not at all sure what the point of “Bloodbath …” is, other than perhaps as a critique of the casual violence of gangsta culture. Nobody in the story has any redeeming qualities, and the tone is pitiless towards even its most victimized characters. One can laugh up to a point at the extremity of the language and images, but there is no shock, no horror. For that, we need to feel something for the characters, and on that score, the story fails miserably.

A perverse sense of delight at the horrors he can inflict on his characters permeates these stories, even “Dormant” the briefest of them. Here, a man is told that he is infected by a parasitic organism of extraterrestrial origin and has only 24 hours to live. There is an effective treatment which can save his life, but he can’t afford it. Ho-hum, we chuckle, as on his way to purchase some painkillers, he witnesses the organism’s explosive exit from another host, described once more in graphic detail. As a critique on America’s inadequate healthcare provision for its poor, it’s about as incisive as a sledgehammer to the cranium, only less subtle.

“The Ugly Truth” is more effective, in spite of the heavy-handed humour. It’s a simple fantasy which works rather like a fairy tale in that the unlikeliest of characters, an ugly, brutish pig-herder, proves himself a hero and gets the girl. Here, Boatman remembers to invest his protagonist with something approaching a personality. We learn how Molo got his nickname, Pigsplitter, and see the first stirrings of his affection for a servant girl, Milane, who alone seems to recognize his true worth. In contrast to the nihilistic attitude towards the characters in “The Drop” and “Bloodbath …” the writer seems to care about Molo, and consequently, so do we.

I’m not really sure what Boatman is trying to do with these stories. He certainly has potential as a horror writer, but he’s treading too familiar ground. Lansdale’s The Drive-In and its sequel are a huge influence, but Lansdale has since moved on to much more fertile territory, retaining his wit and humour, but developing his narrative skills and his ability to create real and sympathetic characters. While reading God Laughs When You Die is, initially at least, a jaw-dropping experience, the pace and tone are so frantic, so over the top, that it all soon wears thin. Whether Boatman can curb his instinct for shock and awe, and develop into a more interesting writer remains to be seen.

Publisher: Dybbuk Press (November 2007)
Price: $10.20
Paperback: 148 pages
ISBN: 0976654628