(Paper: 280
pages)
( Comet Press; May 1, 2013)
ISBN-10: 1936964376
ISBN-13: 978-1936964376
(Kindle edition: $4.99)
Once again a writer with a severely twisted sense
of humor has me staying up late at night laughing my fool head off while
everybody else in my house is sensibly trying to sleep.
The offender this time? David James Keaton, whose
novel, The
Last Projector, was released last week.
But I am not here to talk about The
Last Projector. I will review that at another time. I am here to talk
about a good lead-in to Keaton’s novel, his collection of weird but
entertaining short stories, Fish Bites Cop!
 |
| David James Keaton (Courtesy of Amazon.com) |
It’s not a new release. Fish was published in
2013, but I never ran across it until last week
when I won a paperback copy while participating in an impromptu quiz on
Keaton’s Facebook page.
The anthology defies characterization: I couldn’t
tell from its cover whether the tales the book
contains were going to be real life misadventures of cops, deputy
sheriffs, scout troop leaders and other authority figures, or whether they were
going to be fictionalized stories offered strictly for readers’ entertainment.
As it turned out, the latter is the case: the
stories this antho contains include western yarns, crime tales, prison stories,
horror, fantasy and a few that are kludged together from all these genres.
And the book’s subtitle is a little misleading;
authority figures in some of these fables do, in fact, get a whupping worthy of
a “Fight Club” pairing; but so do run-of-the-mill schmucks who lack the clout
to flatten an éclair.
The reader is the beneficiary in both cases.
From his prefatory remarks in the book’s
introduction, you know you are in good hands. Keaton’s introductory “Open
Letter to Assholes Allergic to Turn Signals,” based on an incident in which the
writer was stopped by an underdressed traffic cop for shooting through a yellow
light signal, explains that Keaton’s malefaction occurred because he was
following a motorist who abruptly turned without signaling his intention.
“This is why I bombed through the red light, I
tell [the cop]. Because you, in your piss-yellow 4X4, slowed down to turn. But
I had no idea what you were doing and the light still had a splash of mustard
on it, so just like you, I zipped on by.”
This leads to Keaton warning an imaginary K-9 unit
dog to ignore “the signals flying off your master up there. That’s just sweat
and confusion. Your master thinks everyone is guilty. He got a shitload of C’s in
high school. So he’s wrong 80 percent of the time. Oh, yes he is! Who’s wrong
90 percent of the time? He is! You’re a good boy! Good boy!”
You get the drift? Keaton writes in a clever
amalgam of third- and first-person stream of consciousness, tough guy patter,
keenly observed detail and comments aimed directly at the reader. He ignores some
of the ironclad rules of narrative writing – or bends them so wickedly that
they no longer have the power to constrain his imagination.
And what an imagination. In “Bad Hand Acting,” he
offers a vignette about a hospitalized man who has suffered a stroke after a
run-in with a mob of bloodthirsty cops over some minor infraction. “Inside this
room is Ron Flowers, soon to be ’39-year-old Ronald J. Flowers from Fort Knox,
Kentucky,’ and all over the news for soaking up about 35 Taser barbs, a
half-gallon of pepper-spray and a dozen blue-sleeved forearms sunk deep into
his throat. . .”
“Why . . . would he resist [arrest] like that?
Only a guilty man soaks up enough electricity to power a city block, pulling
fishhook after fishhook of Taser wire from his torso, all while cuffing any cop
that got too close with fists half the size of Thanksgiving turkeys. A man only
does this when he knows justice has caught up with him.”
The story goes on to make it clear that Flowers
has down nothing to earn this thrashing except fail to show sufficient deference
to the battalion of sadistic blue jackets who have taken him down. And, more to
the point, Keaton makes it clear that the entire incident was instigated by “two
cops a little different than the rest. One big. One little. . . The janitor [who
witnesses this scene] knows immediately, just by being alive on this planet
past the age of 18, any clear physical distinction between partners means they
will be the worst of all.”
A gift for hyperbole is not the only thing that
makes these stories a rare treat. Keaton has a true instinct for the bizarre
and sordid in his fiction. Take his story “Killing Coaches,” which details the
activities of a serial murderer with an MO that sets him apart from the average
sexual psychopath. Or “Greenhorns,”
which features a brand new take on the zombies that have taken the
entertainment world by storm in recent years. Or “Three Ways Without Water,” which
offers a parable about climate change that masquerades as an occult western
tale.
Then there’s “Schrödinger’s Rat,” set in a penitentiary that is utterly
unlike any other. For one thing, it defies the laws of physics: there is a
steady influx of new inmates – but none of the old ones ever seem to leave.
At least, not alive.
Some of Keaton’s stories are gruesome throwbacks
to the kind of grisly literature that was the mainstay of the old Educational
Comics titles like Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror. Others at least superficially seem to be
conventional hardboiled crime yarns. A few are mash-ups of both narrative
styles that seem to fit in their own peculiar niche.
All, however, share a core of grimly savage humor
that puts them in a category all their own.
These stories are populated by strange people,
black rats, white cats, clams, three foot giant mantises, and homicidal burning
cars. The images remain in the reader’s brain like grimly threatening figures
from a Hieronymus Bosch painting viewed in a fun-house mirror.
Don’t worry, though. Eventually they will fade.
Except for the ones that don’t. Those are the ones you are going to have to watch out for. . .
Fish Bites Cop! is relentlessly
entertaining. Get it and read it. It will do a good job of preparing you for The
Last Projector.
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