Buckle up kids!
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| This was the best image I could find of the front cover. Are you starting to see why I bought this book?! |
Okay, that's a lie: There is also the blurb.
"Doomed to life in a wheelchair, Vietnam vet Lewis Kindred lives for the game of poker. He plays like a man possessed, encouraged by his young friend, seventeen-year-old Josh. Then into their lives comes a beautiful woman bearing a fabulous gift - a palm-sized globe of red crystal. The sight of it thrills and disturbs Lewis. He has seen one like it before, in Vietnam, where it brought incredible luck at cards to its owner - and sickening violence to those around him. As Lewis falls under the evil influence of the red ball, Josh looks on in horror. Now it is up to him to save his friend - and to defeat the malignant force that has left a trail of mangled corpses over half the world."
FUCKING SOLD!
This book is offensively nineties.
Our opening line, no word of a lie, is this:
"During the last seventeen minutes of his young life, Ron Payne got laid."
That is a line I have committed to memory. THIS is how you start a book! It gets better when, throughout this little prologue, the clock keeps ticking down and we are constantly informed of how much longer Ron Payne has left to live. See, Ron is the lead singer of a heavy metal group called "Demon Beef" and they are to be:
"the opening act for Megadeath, one of the heaviest metal groups in the land."
Can you taste the Crystal Pepsi yet?
Also, John, everybody knows who Megadeath are. Shaun Hutson never had this problem, we just get metal bands thrown at us and are expected to know them! Heck, Shaun Hutson took it further and had the decency to throw lyrics and we had to work out what was going on and what the hell was even playing. This was before Google and shit!
Speaking of Shaun Hutson: Every part of the book starts with a quote, for this is a serious horror novel, and the opener is by Friedrich Nietzsche, because of course it is. Without even looking him up I could tell exactly which quote it was going to be, and John Gideon does not disappoint!
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster."
Bingo!
Then we get to the meat and bones of our red-hot opener, after the murder of Ron Payne (R.I.P Ron Payne, lead singer of Demon Beef), in the form of a fucking bananas Vietnam flashback. Here there is a "Lieutenant Colonel Gilbert Golightly", holder of only the fifth most amazing name in the book! We meet Kindred's unit (you can doubtless guess who they are simply by watching any 'Nam movie. Hell, "Tropic Thunder" will do!) and Kindred himself.
He's a philosophy student, don't you know?
Of course you already knew that.
He's also a poker player. This too is important.
During an interrogation of a dude, he meets "Sergeant Gamaliel Cartee" who not only has the fucking greatest name in the history of the world and could not more clearly be Satan if he was slapping a nun in the face with a burning red penis and singing The Rolling Stones between bites of apple and draped in snakes, but is also a man with a "writhing blue shadow" and mismatched eyes. He also talks in a New Orleans accent, don't you know?
This book is amazing.
Long story short, much shorter, shit goes South, Kindred ends up playing poker with motherfucking Satan who uses magic to let him win so that he can gift him a red ball; and then goes to have sex with a hooker when his girlfriend sends him a letter to state that she is leaving him.
Believe it or not, Twyla (for that is her name, I love this book) leaving him is an important part!
He bangs the hooker. There is a big thing here, but I wanted to get to this line on Page 67 which I have also committed to memory:
"Suddenly his orgasm exploded like a grenade launcher"
This piece of literary gold is followed up by some INCREDIBLY racist dialogue from the Vietnamese whore (a sentence I am typing in 2019...) and then she is rape-murder-eaten later that evening by Gamaliel Cartee in the form of a man-dog-demon-rapist.
I think I used my meme too early there.
The demon's orgasm, sadly, is not described as exploding like a grenade launcher.
Read this fucking book! Holy shit!
That's the opening!
What follows is basically Faust, with a red ball that brings death to all who use it, as Lewis gets ahold of it again against his better judgement. Our "hero" is Joshua: amateur journalist and full-time idiot, who is investigating the murder of Ron Payne of Demon Beef (R.I.P Ron: he just wanted to get laid) when he and his half-Vietnamese chum/love interest/doomed woman Nicole Tranh are rescued from Neo-Nazis by Gamliel Cartee, now in the form of a hot woman with dreadlocks. She gives him the ball and tells him to give it to Lewis.
Joshua fails.
Thus Satan breaks into his room, gives him a handjob and asks him to try again.
READ THIS FUCKING BOOK!
I won't give away much more from there, because there is so much to unpack that you may as well just toss away the whole suitcase, but for this:
My favourite character in this entire thing is NOT, surprisingly, Gamaliel Cartee or the never-again-mentioned Gilbert Golightly, but in fact a man named REX CASWELL.
REX CASWELL is a forty-three-year-old cocaine kingpin who stole Lewis Kindred's girlfriend from him, has a blonde ponytail, employs a man by the name of Mason Motherfucking Benoit, uses the term "King of the Dweebs" to describe Lewis, and is obsessed with defeating him at poker. Rather than sitting pretty on his coke money, REX CASWELL has devoted ten years of his life to studying poker, only to literally make a date with the devil and crush Lewis in his own favourite venue.
REX CASWELL is a Stephen King bully who managed to reach adulthood, and I love him.
READ THIS FUCKING BOOK!
