Book Review: “Shooting Star” and “Spiderweb” by Robert Bloch
Friday, September 18th, 2009
Shooting Star/Spiderweb by Robert Bloch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A great package! I knew nothing of Robert Bloch when I picked up this book at the library. I selected it largely because of my experiences with other releases from its publisher, Hard Case Crime. Bloch was the author of Psycho and the youngest within H. P. Lovecraft’s circle.
Both novels are gritty, L.A. mean noir, and have some exquisite and darkly funny word-paintings. From Spiderweb:
The Professor nodded and whispered. “We’re back in the world of normal people, my friend. Look at them.”
I looked. . . .
A cannibalistic circle huddled around a small fire, gorging on half-raw weenies and rancid dill pickles. Troglodyte faces gaped in the firelight. A wrinkled, wizened old man’s head: white, bushy hair and beetling black brows that moved convulsively as he chewed with his whole face. There was a fat, blobby woman with stringy hair and a red neck: the rest of her flesh hung in dead white folds, broken here and there by bulging purplish veins that stood out like mountain ranges on a relief map. She slapped at a screaming brat with one beefy hand, slopping beer from a punctured can clutched in the other. A bullet-headed youth squatted next to a portable radio, fiddling with the volume control and scratching the hairy recesses of his armpits.
From Shooting Star:
Yes, there but for the grace of God went all of us, and there seemed to be plenty the grace of God had somehow overlooked. Everybody overlooked them, including the nice, clean, family newspapers and the smug little moralists who devoted their oracular pronouncements to solving vital problems of people who couldn’t make up their minds between buying a new station wagon or taking a vacation in Hawaii this season.
Neither book is perfect. They both hinge on paranoid fears over dated controversies: marijuana in Shooting Star and self-help gurus in Spiderweb. (Incidentally, alcoholism plays a curious subtext in both. Booze gushes everywhere. Perhaps that’s unsurprising given the books were written a half-century ago, but it also suggests a sly take on sanctioned addictions versus criminal ones: “Put down that joint, stop listening to that shrink, and have a drink!”) Shooting Star’s ending is so contrived and deus ex machina it detracts from its overall artistry. But don’t let any of this dissuade you from reading the book. It’s a fantastic read!