The Bridge

John Skipp

Skipp and Spector wrote seven novels together, of which The Bridge is the sixth. The first five are inconsistent, but pretty bang-up thrill rides all the same. When they started on the downhill slide, they started steep.

The premise is pretty simple and very well-used in the atomic age: a whole bunch of toxic waste that's been dumped in one particular site starts mutating things and eventually takes on a will of its own. Hard to go wrong with that one, eh?

It's hard to pinpoint what, exactly, it is about The Bridge that makes it so much less fun than Skipp and Spector's first five wild rides (I have yet to track down a copy of their final collaboration, Animals, which many fans consider their finest). Perhaps it's the kludgy, overbearing moralizing mixed in with Skipp and Spector's usual closet-romance-novel style (one-sentence paragraphs liberally used, large chunks of melodramatic prose, that sort of thing). Perhaps it's an unsuccessful attempt to combat one of horror's most glaring problems-- the "I need some minor characters to kill off, so I'll just put them in the chapter where they die" problem-- by introducing almost every minor character in one previous chapter before they get offed. (Not necessarily THE previous chapter, just A previous chapter.) But hey, at least they made the effort, even if it didn't work too well. Perhaps it's the feeling that there really ARE no major characters here. But then, that ties back into the first problem, which violates the One Sacred Rule of Art: if you have a Big Sociopolitical Idea you want to get across, make sure you have a good enough framework to carry it (or, to once again misquote McLuhan, "the medium IS the message"). Idea Novels that push for social change are almost uniformly bad. As much as I hate to say it, this one is no exception.

That's not to say that there's nothing good about this novel. If you know Skipp and Spector, you know you're in for a gleeful ride through the wonderful world of splatterpunk, where nothing is sacred and every cow gets shish-kebabed before the book ends. All of the unwritten rules get broken here in throughly disgusting ways (the "toddler bouilliabasse" is a particularly nasty moment, I must say). Even with all the moralizing, the lack of connection to the characters, the usual genre-based bad editing, it was still fun. And then I got to the ending.

Not the ending of the novel. The ending of the novel is actually bloody fantastic for a horrorbook. Not a single punch is pulled.

But what happens after the ending of the novel.

(Note: the above is the kind of emotionally manipulative one-sentence paragraph to be found at least twice per page in this book.)

What happens after the ending of the novel as that John and Craig trump their overbearing morality by adding a whole lot of nonfiction morality that's even MORE overbearing. The "please save our earth" appendix chops a star off the book's rating by itself. Note to authors: once you've slapped raders in the face with a dead fish, proceeding to then cram it down their throats is a real good way to anger them.