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Jeremy Robert Johnson is a madman. As poster boy for the locally driven Bizarro fiction movement, he's spent years combating adherence to a single genre, with several collections of violent, drug-fueled, psychotic, reality-shattering short tales. Now Johnson has finally issued his long-awaited debut novel, Skullcrack City (Lazy Fascist Press, 344 pages, $12.95). It was worth the wait.
Skullcrack City veers closer to cyberpunk than any other lazy genre tags one might apply. It takes place on a near-future Earth, and concerns a lonely, paranoid banking drone named SP Doyle. Johnson himself recently left the banking industry, and pours 13 years of dread into Doyle's servitude to a bleak and ruinous system—conspiracy, shadow organizations, and tooth-grinding drug addiction are taken to cosmic and catastrophic extremes.
The MacGuffin in Skullcrack City is Hexadrine, a serious upper of a drug that gives the user a sense of clarity accompanied by a hurricane rush, the urge to jack off until your scar tissue has scar tissue, and which, with overuse, will make your eyes turn black and implode. Doyle's first descent into chronic Hex abuse inspires him to do right by single-handedly taking down the big banks. It's the kind of grandiose fixation that a motivated addict can convince himself is possible. But in Johnson's universe, the opposition includes brain-eating monsters and apocalyptic wolf gods.
Doyle would be a tough character to piggyback for 332 pages were it not for Johnson's sharp prose, and Doyle's relentless focus on keeping his mother and his pet turtle Deckard unscathed in the midst of drug deals gone wrong, stolen financial secrets, and a steadily unhinging tear in the fabric of reality. But for each trip back to 45th Street to score more Hex, there's a balancing scene in which Doyle closes the blinds to feed his turtle worms and kiss its shell.
If there's a problem with Skullcrack City, it's that the third act is nearly as long as the first two. And while a whole lot goes on, and the resolution has a denouement and an epilogue, there are still reams of pages, fairly late in the game, that get hung up on a lot of meta-scientific jargon and cyber-dimensional gobbledygook that probably sounds brilliant when you're deep in a Hex binge. Henry Miller used to pull this off, but he was digressing into pure poetry, not inventing scientific portmanteaus just to explain concepts so fantastic that no suspension of disbelief is even possible. Most readers will start skimming ahead in search of anchor points. Luckily, there are plenty of them, and the end is both unexpected and rewarding.
GO: Jeremy Robert Johnson reads from Skullcrack City on Thursday, May 14, at Powell's on Hawthorne, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd., powells.com. 7:30 pm. Free.
WWeek 2015
