What’s a nice girl like The New York Times doing reviewing a bad boy like J.F. Gonzalez’s SURVIVOR? The NYT‘s cover blurb says the novel “pushes your eyes of the page and then pulls them back,” which is a euphemism for “this one is sick, but you’re just as sick for reading it.” Fair enough.
It begins with a highway road-rage incident that yields genuine unease (especially for someone like me who harbors travel anxiety), but is child’s play compared to the grisly scenario that will follow. The victims are vacationing yuppie lawyer couple Brad and Lisa Miller, and through a set of circumstances too complex to go into here, Brad has to spent the weekend in jail under citizen’s arrest. Lisa has it worse, however, when the man who put Brad in the clinker kidnaps her from her motel room and hauls her off to a remote cabin.
The man promises he won’t hurt her. But Al and Animal will! They are, respectively, the behind-the-camera and on-camera talent of a series of underground snuff films, in the next of which Lisa is set to star as the most unlucky and unfortunate receptacle of Animal’s fluids, desires and abuse. She won’t live through it, which is exactly the point of a snuff film (in reality, merely the stuff of urban legends … we hope).
Needless to say, a huge twist occurs before her life can be extinguished, and you’re going to react in one of two ways: by tearing through the rest as fast as possible to find out what happens, or by hurling the book across the room. Just before it, I thought SURVIVOR was fairly tame compared to other stuff I’ve read – perhaps one Habitrail away from matching the depravity of AMERICAN PSYCHO – but then that damned page 142 rolled around. I won’t divulge the details, but suffice to say, it’s not something I ever expected to read anywhere, an act that not only puts the “X” in “extreme,” but bolds and underlines it as well. And you’ve still got 230 pages left to go!
Yet I couldn’t not finish it, because I had to see these people punished. And that trip is wrought with frustration and tension, both marks of a truly effective horror novel. Passages will sicken, yet seem oddly comic, i.e. “But he’d never thought of a neck stump as a sexual orifice before last night” or “I like to baste the asses in the oven with onions and bacon strips.” But at least the shock has a definite purpose to the story; without it, there simply wouldn’t be one.
That said, SURVIVOR needs some tightening, as points and phrases are repeated multiple times, often in the form of awfully long exposition that is entirely repetitive. And despite that occasional bit of over-the-top dialogue, the book feels mostly grounded in reality, except when the bad guys get diarrhea of the mouth, such as when Animal launches into a 13-page explanation of how he came to be the beast he is. You could do it in two, though I’d argue it’s more horrifying not to know at all.
Purposely unpleasant and unflinching, SURVIVOR’s zero-immunity stance makes for a read that is good, though not exactly enjoyable. Make any sense? If so, you’ll likely be part of the group that makes it past page 142. –Rod Lott
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This was a tough one. While I appreciate it as a good book, like the reviewer says, I didn’t “enjoy” it. Considering the subject matter, I’d say that’s a high compliment to the author – he pulled me in with a good story, but he didn’t glorify the villains. I’d recommend it.