Book Review: "White Trash Gothic" by Edward Lee

This was a fairly cheap book on my Kindle and so, even though I judged from the cover that it wasn't going to be much but would be a little bridge from one good book to another, I decided I was going to try to get into it. Needless to say, I did not have to try very hard. Although I have some questionable opinions of the splatter-punk sub-genre, this book proved itself to be surprisingly very interesting. A slow, slimy descending into something more disgusting and nightmarish, the author writes dread absolutely brilliantly. Yes, it is graphic and yes, sometimes you'll have to stop reading it because there's only so much you can take - but you're going to genuinely want to know what is going to happen to our main character: a man who does not even know himself. Quite literally...he doesn't know who he is.

We are on a bus. The protagonist doesn't know who he is, only where he is going. He's going to get a manuscript that he wrote, an unfinished book. We're taken into the past where we see the protagonist visiting a doctor about memory loss and trauma, we read how he talks about the fact that he doesn't remember anything and yet his friends have told him that he is an acclaimed author. Each time, he would apparently write a book in a different motel. The author establishes our main character as not only an acclaimed author but someone who feels like a real person, someone suffering and yet, someone utterly powerless against this trauma. By the time we see him on the bus, he has almost resigned himself to this task. The crawling dread is buried beneath the quiet, the unsettling nature of the voices on the bus and the way in which there are sounds from things that could not possibly be on that trip with them.

As I have said, the graphic nature of the writing can be gruesome from time to time but I have learnt that this may not only be because of the splatter-punk genre but rather for the effect of having the reader see what the main character thinks is in front of him. Since he has no memory of who he is, we cannot find ourselves relying on someone (I mean, he cannot even rely on himself!). We therefore find ourselves questioning how disgusting and gruesome the nature of the surrounding area is, these images of nightmare fuel - whether everything is in his head, or it is all reality, or whether it is 50-50. The author leaves it hanging in the air as a possibility you cannot stop thinking about as the book goes on. On his quest to find out who he is, he starts to discover nightmares about the town he is in - the imagery becomes more and more intense and disgusting, coming to a crescendo over and over again. Again, not only a part of the splatter-punk, but a possible result of the grand amount of trauma suffered by the protagonist. As the atmosphere becomes more chaotic, the instability of the main character is therefore being revealed to us.

Despite the gore, the book is very atmospheric. It's filled with description and the pacing is something to be admired. The author manages to control the pace of the most disgusting and graphic imagery by slowing it down to the details, forcing the reader to look at it even though they definitely don't want to. It's these books that usually have many people who hate them because of how they feel like needless torture and in most cases, they are needless torture - though I think that this book is definitely smarter.

All in all, I enjoyed my reading experience of this one. I understand that it is part of a series but I cannot imagine I'll be reading the next book just yet. I would definitely like to though. There is something definitely strange about this book - the vocabulary sets out the character despite the main character not being the narrator, the atmosphere is coloured with the main character's trauma and the pacing almost feels like controlled chaos. I would definitely recommend this to people look for a gruesome horror novel with a bit of literary technique.