Deadweight

Robert Devereaux

Records are meant to be broken, and evolution eventually breaks them all. As the species gets stronger, faster, what have you, the feats of generations before pale in comparison to the feats achieved by more recent souls. Some records stand for decades, such as Dr. Fager's seven-furlong Belmont track record (which stood until Artax shattered it in 1998), but eventually, they come down.

There are exceptions to every rule. No one has ever seriously considered that Secretariat's world record for the mile and a half distance of the Belmont Stakes is in danger, nor has anyone ever considered that it will be in the future. Some baseball records have stood for eighty years or more, never in any doubt. Many still consider Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom, made in 1975, the nadir of underground film, even as the past quarter-century has made some of Pasolini's extremities regular prime time fare.

Extreme horror, punditized in the late eighties as "splatterpunk," is a genre that set out to break conventional records, and then, having achieved that, set out to break its own. Joe Lansdale took aim at Clive Barker. Ray Garton took aim at Joe Lansdale. Richard Laymon lorded it over everyone. And then came Robert Devereaux, an unassuming short-story writer who looks, more than anything, like a used-car mechanic crossed with a teddy bear. Devereaux, an almost complete unknown outside a cult following who'd been gobbling up his stories for a few years, released his first novel in the much-vaunted Abyss line from Dell, and became only the second author to publish a first novel there. Kathe Koja was the first. Kathe Koja has since become as much a household name as any horror author can be, while Devereaux has stayed unknown. Why?: Because Devereaux didn't just push the envelope, he threw it onto the fire. And no one has even come close in the intervening six years. Deadweight is, simply, the most extreme horror novel ever written.

Karin Tanner is a woman with a history of abuse. She was sexually molested by her father as a child, and the pattern of abuse continued into marriage, as it usually does. Her husband ended up getting so nasty that Karin jammed a knife into his heart and split it clean in two. The husband, Danny Daniels, was the kind of guy to bully the cemetery into letting him buy a second plot for his dog, and after Danny was killed, so was the mutt, and the two of them went into the ground together. Karin, on trial for murder, fell in love with her lawyer, a dominant personality in the courtroom, and the two got hitched. Problem is, what Frank Tanner has in the courtroom doesn't seem to translate to the home, and Karin-- still looking for that pattern of abuse-- is starting to wonder if the marriage is going to work. She's also going to Danny's grave. First once a week, then a couple of times a week, and finally every day for an hour or two. Karin, who's inherited the super-green-thumb that passes down through the women in her family, learns (after Danny's grave has to be filled in... odd in this day and age, no?) that said super-green-thumb property enables things to grow--fast Ground that was seeded only that day turns green when she concentrates on making the grass grow. And here she is spending a whole lot of time at her dead abusive husband's grave. I think you can see where this is going.

Deadweight isn't a great novel simply because it's extreme. That would be too easy (and would also open the door to forcing the consideration of endless numbers of Friday the 13th sequels as good cinema). Deadweight is a great novel because it combines the extremity with profound insight. Karin Tanner isn't the usual cardboard-cutout heroine, and she isn't a sterotypical abuse victim, but she does react in the ways abuse victims do, and her struggle to break the cycle, even while it's complicated by the rather impossible sequence of events, never goes beyond the bounds of believability. In fact, very little in this book does, other than its premise. And the other characters here, even the minor ones, have the same complexity of construction that Karin does.

This is definitely not a book for everyone. It ranks exceptionally high, even for splatterpunk, in the gore and sexual deviance departments. But it also stands head and shoulders above anything else in the genre, in terms of quality, extremity, and sheer brutal power. It deserves a much wider audience than it's ever been afforded.