Victor Gischler has been spreading his genre wings as of late, venturing out of crime last year and into sci-fi territory with his post-apocalyptic romp Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse. This year he tackled horror with his usual hilarious gusto in Vampire A Go-Go, but next year he returns to crime again with The Deputy. Thing is, The Deputy shows some major muscle flexing as well, only this time it’s not through fucking with the genre so much as playing it a little straighter and definitely darker. In other words, Victor Gischler is fast becoming a pulp renaissance man.
Vampire A Go-Go is the story of Allen Cabbot, a mediocre grad student with a near supernatural talent for research. In order to avoid flunking out, Cabbot begrudgingly accompanies the mysterious Dr. Evergreen to Prague as a research assistant. But Allen isn’t even able to score some good pot or check out a bordello before he’s thrust in the middle of a war between heavily armed priests and an order of wizards and witches for control of the philosopher’s stone.
But if that’s not enough bug-fuckery for you, rest assured that pretty much everything under the monster movie sun is covered in Vampire A Go-Go – vampires, werewolves, whatever the fuck. This is about as kitchen-fucking-sink as a book gets, and it keeps coming at you fast and funny the whole trip through. Gischler keeps the body count high, the tone hilarious, and the ideas and satiric jabs sharp and smart.
Did it work for me as well as Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse? No, but that’s a matter of genre. I’m, obviously, a crime guy, but I love me some post-apocalyptic shit something fierce, therefore I naturally enjoyed Apocalypse more. And while I’m not usually much for supernatural horror, it’s a testament to the Gisch that even a non-fan like me ate up this all-out fucking hoot of a book.
More the Nerd’s speed is Gischler’s upcoming The Deputy, a slacker noir that would make a kick-ass book double feature (if such a thing existed) with Charlie Huston’s The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death (Huston being the other pulp renaissance man knocking them out of the park these days).
In The Deputy we follow part-time policeman and failed musician Toby Sawyer as he has the most completely fucked night of his entire life. In the dusty shithole Oklahoma town of Coyote Crossing, Luke Jordan (of the infamous hell-raising Jordan Brothers clan, of course) is shot over what looks like a drunken disagreement about a woman. Seeing how the local police department is under-funded and under-staffed, Toby is stuck with the bitch job of babysitting the body until the coroner shows up. But Toby decides to pay a visit to his jail-bait mistress, and the late Mr. Jordan goes missing. Soon enough Toby is up to his fucking eyeballs in police corruption and a smuggling ring dealing in illegal Mexicans. Then, naturally, the body count starts rising….
Now this is about as fast-fucking-paced as books get, one giant hair-raising game of out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-fire. But what makes The Deputy really sing is the sad little realities of Toby’s fucked life. He lives in a shit shack of a trailer with a girl he knocked up and their kid, neither party in the marriage having wanted this going-nowhere-fast existence in this deader-than-dead-fucking-end hellhole of a town. Toby is cheating, his wife is cheating, and when Toby’s numbed existence as a failed rock-and-roller is upturned by this crazy night’s events, it’s arguably the best thing to ever happen to him. That Gischler can squeeze all this fantastic character work into the book’s timeline, which is really just a few hours and billion awesome action set-pieces long, is a testament to his storytelling abilities.
Make no mistake: this shit is just as fast and funny as what we’ve come to expect from the man who gave us such classics as Pistol Poets and Shotgun Opera; it’s just that this time out it hurts more, the characters dig under a couple more layers of your skin. The Deputy is Victor Gischler’s finest book to date, and you better fucking believe that’s fucking saying something.
But what can I say? I’m a fucking tease because that shit ain’t out until April thirtieth of next fucking decade, for Christ’s sakes (damn, it feels good to be a book critic). Until its release, I recommend you pick up a copy of Vampire A Go-Go to tide your anxious ass over, dear reader. What else were you gonna do? Tackle some lame bullshit abstinence vampire book like fucking Twilight?
Editor’s note: The review, commentary, and cover art on and for The Deputy are based on the Bleak House ARC that was sent out before the title’s move to Tyrus.
Living on the other side of the Pacific from Powell’s in Portland, whenever in P-town, my hometown, I do my best to get some hours in at the best bookstore in the Multiverse. It was there I bought a copy of “Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse” (after having spotted it in a Barnes and Noble). As soon as I am finished with Robert Morgan’s “The Things That Are Not There”, and after coming across this review of “The Deputy”, I just might give it a go (instead of “The Scar”). Maybe I’ll read another Morgan book (like Richard’s 3rd Takeshi Kovacs yarn, ha ha, not another Teddy London tale by that first R. Morgan I mentioned).