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I WILL RISE By MICHAEL LOUIS CALVILLO (Lachesis Publishing; 2007)
Books like this are the reason I slog through so many “underground”
horror novels, most of which leave me cold.
The fact is there’s usually a damn good reason major publishers
pass on those books that debut in expensive trade paperback editions from
companies you’ve never heard of, yet every once in a while an indie
horror novel appears that actually lives up to its billing.
Such is the case with I WILL RISE, from the Canadian outfit
Lachesis (who also issued the book in multiple ebook formats--go to www.lachesispublishing.com).
It’s the first novel by Michael Louis Calvillo, and one of the
most promising debuts I’ve encountered in some time.
Why the major publishers passed up this mind-bender I’ll never
understand.
Than again, maybe I do
have an idea of why Calvillo’s book went the indie route.
It’s everything we’ve come to expect from underground horror
and then some: defiantly idiosyncratic, shocking, subversive, ambitious
and one-of-a-kind. A Beach
Read it definitely isn’t! I
sincerely hope I WILL RISE doesn’t get lost in the horror shuffle, as
it’s a cult waiting to be born.
Told in a first person stream-of-consciousness style vaguely
reminiscent of authors like Chuck Palahniuk and Kathe Koja, it’s the
warped tale of the thirtyish Charles, a severely alienated, ugly,
maladjusted virgin who’s prone to seizures and suffers from a weird hole
in his left palm, an apparent birth defect.
When we first meet Charles he’s working in a restaurant he plans
to sabotage by spiking its flour supply with Ajax, being a perpetually
self-pitying, revenge-seeking loser. After about fifty pages Charles’s relentlessly anti-social
mindset becomes positively suffocating (this guy makes Holden Caulfield
seem like a choirboy), but then there occurs a most unexpected plot
twist... Charles
is caught breaking into the restaurant to carry out his nefarious deed and
shot to death by cops. Yet
he’s brought back to life by a Godlike force who gives him a mission:
snuff out the “human virus”, which the now-undead Charles can
accomplish simply by touching people with his mutant left hand.
24 hours later those people will all die, but not before passing on
the killing touch themselves, thus spreading death across the globe.
Charles is assisted in his quest by Annabelle, an equally
disenfranchised misanthrope who contacts Charles through her dreams,
projecting a three dimensional image of herself as a hot, scantily clad
babe to help him along. In
real life, however, Annabelle is a dumpy blind woman who lives in squalor
with her mother; her interaction with Charles humanizes him somewhat,
giving him second thoughts about his mission to destroy humanity.
This newfound compassion, while directly inspired by Annabelle,
complicates their burgeoning romance somewhat, as she remains hellbent on
exterminating the human virus, and furthermore can’t be touched by
Charles lest she be killed like everyone else he comes into contact with.
There’s much more, of course, in an ever-mutating narrative that
continually ratchets up the weirdness factor with a succession of
impossible-to-predict twists and bizarre characters.
They include a five-year-old genius with ESP who accompanies
Charles during the early stages of his odyssey, a gaggle of crazies who
learn of Charles’ mission through shared dreams and become determined to
do something about it, and Allen Michael, a slimy TV personality who
becomes the focus of Charles’ rampage, especially after he discovers
Annabelle may have been psychically two-timing him with Michael.
What precisely should we make of this wild ride?
Frankly I’m not sure. What
I do know is that it’s written with real assurance and a slip-streamy,
pop-inflected vernacular that often gives it the feel of a psychotic
nightmare--or perhaps a near-death hallucination a
la William Golding’s PINCER MARTIN or J.G. Ballard’s UNLIMITED
DREAM COMPANY. Whatever it
is, I WILL RISE is unique and oddly compelling, one of the finest, most
challenging novels of 2007. Don’t
let it pass you by.
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