Goodnight, Monster Book

The biggest boldest pieceofshit pulpedout ridiculous shitshow of a novel I've come across. ever. i love it.

here’s the deal: an effete bookworm gets on a boat that crashes just off the san fransiscan coast and is scooped out of the water and brought onto the seal-hunting Ghost, headed to Japan, and captained by Wolf Larson, the darkest, most demented and brutal guy to walk the planet. this guy makes ahab, kurtz, and bligh look like merril fucking stubing. no shit. and he’s got a brother named Death! Death Larson! and Wolf Larson! i mean, c'mon. (Death Larson: "…golden bearded like a sea-king… six feet eight or nine inches in stature – 240 pounds. And there was no fat on him. It was all bone and muscle.")

our faithful narrator, one – wait for it, wait for it – ‘Hump’ Van Weydon describes Wolf as "not immoral. merely unmoral." forget leopold, loeb, or raskalnikov: Wolf Larson is the true nietzschean superman. here’s a typical bit of dialogue that Wolf happily spews while observing one of his crewmen:

Look at him, Hump. Look at this bit of animated dust, this aggregation of matter that moves and breathes and defies me and thoroughly believes itself to be compounded of something good; that is impressed with certain fictions such as righteousness and honesty…

in another scene, to more fully express the idea that the human animal can never fully accept death even if the intellect believes it has, Wolf strangles Hump into unconsciousness while waxing philosophic on the old body/mind dialectic... purty cool.

through the course of the book, Wolf Larson beats the shit out of multiple men at once, climbs a ladder with attackers hanging off his arms back and legs, he beats the crap out of Hump, Johnson, Leach, Johanson, Cooky, and, yes, even Death Larson. he beats up a shark. yes. a shark. after tossing Mugridge overboard, Wolf spies a shark fin, and with a single arm he hoists Mugridge out – the sharks leaps out of the water and bites off Mugridge’s foot! naturally, while the crew scrambles for a tourniquet, Wolf’s gotta teach the shark a lesson. later on, Wolf tries to set himself on fire, laughs when knives are thrown at him, and, finally, he fully enjoys it as his brain slowly shuts down. yeah, you read that right. unfortunately, the book gets kind of good (y'know, really good. not, like, gloriously deranged good) at the end when Hump, Maud Brewster (the fast-talking NYC poetess), and Wolf get shipwrecked on a tiny island inhabited by angry seals and some kind of mysterious neurological condition shuts down Wolf’s body bit by bit eventually reducing him to a blind, deaf, mute, quadriplegic who conveys his profound and nihilistic joy at the universe's ultimate 'fuck you' by flashing a crooked smile and tapping messages out with a single finger.

you really gotta read this shit to believe it. it’s fucking great. it’s the book that Uma Thurman’s character in Sweet and Lowdown would have written. it's the book i wish i'd written. and i gotta profess a deep love for jack london. multiple novels about dogs? and now this? fuck yes, man. you are my hero. i spent this past new year's at london’s favorite bar, The First and Last Chance Saloon (named such as it’s right on the water: the sailor’s first chance to get drunk upon arrival and last chance upon departure), the very bar where jack london wrote The Sea Wolf. explains a lot. he must’ve been shitfaced when he wrote this madhouse. absofuckinglutely.

well, don't know if i wanna give this five stars or one star, so i'll be a total pussy and give it three.