Jeremy Robert Johnson ~ Skullcrack City

I first came to know of Jeremy Robert Johnson‘s work through the generous and encouraging daisy-chain of recommendations/collaborations/consanguine-writer’s blog-nexes which began for me with Chuck Pahlaniuk and continued through OCDevotional binge-readings of the work of Stephen Graham Jones and Carlton Mellick III, among others.

It’s been awhile since we’ve had a novel from JRJ, and this one’s well worth the wait: nothing short of the Childhood’s End Redux in newly wrought terms of genetic alteration-as-mass-media-phenomenon, corporate over-reach inevitably grasping all human interaction, shared consciousness (think Leopold Bloom’s internal monologue multiplied and delineated only by the voracious appetite of an anthropomorphic brain eater/assimilator).

This is a narrative so toxic and repellant that only the comic timing and smarm of a Stanley Kubrick could keep the horror escalating like perfectly calibrated injections of honey and cayenne in hot chicken wings. The later I read, the hotter it got. Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the momentum, once engaged in speed-freak intensity, never relented, leaving me jonesin’ for more.

The occasional multi-voiced screaming voices in trapped enduced-psychotic cerebral entities (Lucia-worthy contrapuntal, not to presuppose operatically executed sextets+ make me wish for Skullcrack City to become Skullcrack Universe.

Long may it wave. Long may we read.

 

JRJ JRJ2 JRJ3

 

Subscribe

Never miss out on Christopher’s events or special notices.

Thank you for subscribing.

Something went wrong.

Leave a Comment

Share →
Send this to a friend