Mark Binelli

Once I finally started reading this book (which I received as an LT Early Reviewers book way back in 2015), I still only managed to read it in fits and starts over a period of several years. It spent most of that time languishing at the bottom of my TBR stack, all the while throwing me the stink eye.

Starting out, I was unclear whether the book was supposed to be read as a fictionalized biography of Hawkins or as something else, something weirder. Some sections read as straight-up biography, laying out facts in a journalistic style, providing block quotes, and even citing print sources, before transitioning into fictional-sounding vignettes that couldn’t possibly be true (could they . . . ?). That uncertainty bothered me more than it should have; nevertheless, the constant detours for Internet fact-checking proved off-putting to my reading experience.

The sequence of vignettes in the first fifty pages or so comes across mostly as a series of non sequiturs, bouncing back and forth through different periods in Hawkins’s life—sometimes interesting, but unsatisfying as a whole. I was looking for even a vaguely plotted through line to establish and anchor the narrative. After setting the book aside for months and then picking it up again around page sixty, I was able to read the main character as merely a fictional character, not agonizing anymore over whether I was reading a fictionalized account of a real person or not. I was at least enjoying much of the writing, if not the actual novel itself.

There’s a bit somewhere in the middle of the book about Jay’s myriad offspring meeting up at a reunion of sorts (an event that’s apparently based in fact), which struck me as a perfect ending to the novel. But sticking it in the middle, with no lead-in or follow-up, was a puzzling authorial choice, and left the remainder of the book feeling like a long, drawn-out epilogue of sorts.

Part of the back cover text uses the term “collage” in describing the book, and that’s very much what it is—a collection of intriguing pictures from Screaming’ Jay Hawkins’s life that manages to cover up an area on a blank wall with a lot of colorful images, but without painting a coherent and focused view of the man. This was an interesting but ultimately frustrating read that I probably would have enjoyed more if it had either been a straight biography of Hawkins or a novel featuring a character like him.… (més)

Quite disappointed in this. To be honest, I didn't think it was that well written for one thing, nor was it well organised (individual chapters were okay, but the arrangement of material in there seemed haphazard). There was no overarching thesis, it was really just a collection of disjointed anecdotes and potted histories. Sometimes with some strange digressions. It all felt a bit perfunctory - as one example, the author sneaks in to watch the filming of a blockbuster movie in his old school; at some point, before the big denouement, he gets bored, goes home, gets high with his neighbour, regrets having left the shoot but (thankfully) decides against driving back, wakes up the next day and goes back to find everyone gone and a few remnants of the shoot. There seemed a certain lack of purpose in his examination.

He also rails against "ruin porn" and people who go exploring the abandoned buildings, with seemingly little awareness that, without that direction and organisation - without that seriousness of purpose - his book itself does not amount to much more than that.… (més)