BIBLIOFILE
Butchershop in the Sky: Premature Ejaculations 1989-99

by James Havoc
(Creation Books, 204 pages, $19.95)

James Havoc writes like a man possessed. Or, perhaps more accurately, Havoc writes as if he wishes he were.

Spurting wetly across the page in a viscous blur of verbiage, Havoc's prose seeks to transgress not only literary conventions but the bounds of sanity as well. His is a nightmarish, amoral vision of demented sexuality, where the bloody globs of Lovecraft's chthonic monstrosities, Bataille's obscene eroticism and Artaud's violently scatological surrealism are thrown against the wall of propriety to see what sticks--or at least make a nasty splat to scare Christian squares. In a less elite milieu, Havoc could school all the Satan-stumping and thesaurus-thumping death metal bands (who love such multisyllabic mantras about demon sluts and devil spawn) in the fine art of horror-lyric writing.

Tellingly, Butchershop's opening section, a reprinting of Havoc's novella Raism, pays tribute to the spirit of Gilles de Rais, the 15th-century child murderer whom Bataille also lionized. Unlike Bataille's thoughtful championing of the psychotic Frenchman, though, Havoc's work seems less intellectually meditated, fired from the groin as much as the cerebellum, a relentless orgy of perverse adjectives: "I, Gilles de Rais, the Master, Ditchfinder General, pink venus rag-burner, headsman harvesting traumatized afterbirths of cannibal tar babies, woodsman whose venereal topiary wrought the hirsute caryatid carcinoma shadowing God's fundament...." And so on--that sentence alone continuing for 150 more words of visceral description.

On this level, Butchershop works a dark magic, seeking not to tell stories, but to explore the vast mutant possibilities of humanity--and language--as it breeds with its latent pagan lusts and perversions. Venture forth at your own risk. John Graham

Generation Ex: Tales from the
Second Wives Club

by Karen Karbo
(Bloomsbury, 235 pages, $24.95)

Karen Karbo will read at Powell's, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm Wednesday, April 25.

Portlander Karen Karbo built a lucrative freelance career trying adventurous things--trapeze flying, shark feeding--and writing interesting articles about the experiences. Now she tackles perhaps the scariest situation of all: love the second time around.

In Generation Ex: Tales from the Second Wives Club, Karbo examines the blended family, a relatively new social phenomenon, and takes it a step further. With an ever-increasing divorce rate, today's American family often consists of a mom, dad, stepmom, stepdad, step-siblings and half-siblings galore, a slew of grandparents--in other words, an extreme family.

Karbo once again relies on personal experience to interpret her topic. She describes her relationship with a mild-mannered teacher and, more interestingly, his deranged ex-wife. From the moment ex-wife sneaks into the house and cuts the crotches out of the author's underpants to the last-straw scene (livestock), Karbo tells all. Her training as a novelist allows her to cut straight to the base emotions: "I knew she was fat; she knew I was old." To augment her theory of family evolution, she shares juicy anecdotal evidence gathered from other second wives and husbands, coins a few words--divarriage, exatitis--and invokes the Greeks. She even provides a storybook happy ending.

Karbo isn't a licensed therapist, and her book isn't really a self-help manual. Mostly, Generation Ex is a hilarious and sometimes hideous look at modern romance from the other side of 35. Second wives and divorcées will find plenty of commiseration. Married folk will be scared straight into lifelong commitment. Susan Wickstrom

Bye Bye Baby
by Caroline Sullivan

(Bloomsbury Books, 273 pages, $14.95)

Camille Paglia knows why boys are blowing up schools: "Modern schools have become dungeons for active young men at their most hormonally driven period of life," she has written. Taken further, her theory might explain why mobs of blossoming maidens madly pursue boy bands.

While obsessing over semi-talented fey fellows may seem a passive undertaking, Caroline Sullivan's amazing true-life tale of stalking the Bay City Rollers in the mid-'70s posits that this chase may feed off an atavistic urge to hunt and gather. (Benicio, anyone?)

Now a respected music writer for London's The Guardian newspaper, Sullivan was a bored, music-obsessed New Jersey teen when the Scottish lad band caught her eye. Soon, she and a girl crew lied their way across America in hopes of laying a Roller. While Pamela Des Barres' I'm with the Band excels at name dropping, Bye Bye Baby is so well-crafted that the reader actually gets snared in the frenzy.

One scene finds the fan girls camped at a hotel where the Rollers are staying. There, they gather to confront a girl who rolled one of the boys: "We watched transfixed, for Cathy was normally the gentlest of souls, but right now she was clearly not herself. 'Did you have a good time?' she demanded, her voice trembling. Debbie Bottom eyed her with alarm and whispered 'It was alright,' then darted around her, out the door and into a taxi as if Cathy was waving a machete."

In the end, Sullivan's experiences tracking the Rollers by creating false business cards and bogus journalism credentials probably did more to prepare her for life than the high school she quit. And what does that say about our education system?
Caryn B. Brooks