Order THE INCURABLES here
(also reviewed)
Order CORROSION here
Order FACTORY TOWN here
We live in a world where it is dangerous to have good ideas, especially for artists and entertainers. Great concepts are condemned to end up being sold over and over again the same people until they are rendered meaningless. For example, noir fiction lost the jazz bars and the fedoras somewhere in sixties, but it is still how it the genre is sold today every soul who's every been on Twitter has seen some jerkoff wearing a fedora on his feed trying to sell you a copy of their 76 pages eBook no one wants to read.
That's only one example. A genre that has infiltrated every aspect of pop culture, but has oddly managed to keep its integrity as a genre is Gothic fiction. Whatever we call gritty in today's mainstream fiction is basically a Gothic varnish applied to a narrative, but the genre has been so enduring and has known so many incarnations that is has always found a way to trump capitalism and remain art. Jon Bassoff's latest Gothic horror novel THE INCURABLES is once again that the genre a is just the gift that keeps on giving to literature. The dark and the twisted never run out of original ideas.
THE INCURABLES is the story of Dr. Walter Freeman *, one of the thinking minds behind transorbital lobotomy, caught in a chance of guard at the hospital he works with. Times are changing and the members of the board don't believe in his methods anymore, so they decide to shelve him like a memento of an embarrassing past. Humiliated, Freeman leaves a his life behind and hits the road with his last subject Edgar Ruiz, looking to reach into the smaller communities and let the benefits of his treatment speak for themselves. Only problem is that Freeman sees himself as a savior for the wordless masses, but they already have set ideas on their own salvation.
There's a debate online as to what genre Jon Bassoff is actually writing. It's always been a difficult to say but THE INCURABLES might be his clearest visions yet. It's a Gothic Horror novel. There's an argument to be made about it being a Southern Gothic - and there are elements of it - but there is little to no magic realism in it, The American Midwest, in this case Oklahoma, is depicted as the landscape to hell. It's a place where people are behaving like animals, giving in to their lower instincts and waiting for a Messiah (any Messiah really) to save them and help them transcend their hopeless reality. THE INCURABLES will trigger a lot of debate about its nature still, but it's freak everybody out just the same.
That said, THE INCURABLES is a pretty cool conceptual novel about the fight between science and religion for the soul of the American people in the 1950s. It's arguable that this fight is still ongoing today, but what was so fascinating about that era and that Jon Bassoff nailed is that it was a time where people were looking for saviors. THE INCURABLES is a bit bleak for the sake of being bleak, which is a recurring thing with Jon Bassoff's novels. I have nothing against bleakness in general and Bassoff does it as well as anybody, but if characters have nothing to look forward except their own destruction, it makes your novel more predictable than it should. I don't think it's a major thing with THE INCURABLES since it's really a novel about a clash of ideas, it's still a thing with Jon Bassoff's fiction.
THE INCURABLES is something really precise: a Gothic horror novel about the greatest, most enduring ideological debate in the history of men. It does quite a good job at pointing out the fallacy of set ideas in a world that is constantly changing. Overall, I have to admit that I liked Jon Bassoff's previous novel FACTORY TOWN the best because I thought it was its most original and unpredictable novel to date, but it was really a tough order to replicate and to follow up on, really. THE INCURABLES is a chaotic, violent, cold-hearted and oddly ideological novel about the fatality of the human condition. It's another dark literary UFO from Jon Bassoff, who's turned his graphic and elusive style into his main calling card.
* Didn't know, but I found out while researching for that review that Walter Freeman actually existed!!!
* Didn't know, but I found out while researching for that review that Walter Freeman actually existed!!!
