Book Review : Max Booth III - Maggots Screaming! (2022)
"Dylan, for the last goddamn time, we are not zombies."
The Walking Dead changed the way we understand zombies. George Romero’s living dead turned into "the infected" in what seemed like a pretty sudden cultural shift. Rotting creatures weren’t empty shells anymore. They didn’t exactly have agency, but there not quite as dead as their predecessors. Culture did what culture does and soon enough, we had zombie protagonists. I thought it was a really fucking stupid shift for many years, but then I’ve read Max Booth III’s novel Maggots Screaming! and I changed my mind.
Maggots Screaming! tells the story of Dylan and Max, a father and son duo who dig up three bodies in their garden while trying to destroy what’s left of Dylan’s mother Lori at what used to be their family home. The bodies are those of Dylan, Max and Lori, who technically aren’t dead. Dylan and Max just found versions of themselves who are. Startled by their discovery, they bring the bodies inside the house and soon enough they start inexplicably rotting away too and their lives become a race against nothingness.
Being and rottingness
If this premise sounds completely absurd, let me reassure you: it’s by design. I was SO not convinced when I started Maggots Screaming! but Max Booth III brought my doubts behind the shed and put them down like the rabid jackals they were about sixteen pages in. If you’re familiar with Booth’s work, it’s clear what this novel is. I mean, the characters are named after his wife, his wife’s son, his friend and author Andrew Hilbert and himself. Whatever’s going on in Maggots Screaming! needs to be taken allegorically.
This novel is a thinly veiled allegories for the anxieties of bringing up a young person in this losing game we call life. Death and decay are an inevitability and confronting this should most definitely freak you out. In that sense, Maggots Screaming! is an almost moving ode to life and family, but it’s also a deconstruction of death and an attempt to integrate it as a part of natural life. Booth does it by using the most foul, disgusting and morally questionable humour. I thought it was great, but not everybody will.
My favourite moment in Maggots Screaming! is when Dylan, Max and Andy are being given a tour of a body farm. A place where forensic anthropologists study the decomposition of bodies. They are being accompanied by Doctor Winzenread, a beautiful mess of empathy, professionalism, loneliness and questionable humor who is SO HAPPY to have people to talk to. On top of being extremely funny, the way she describes death is beautiful and soothing. If every other character is based on existing people, this one is one of the absolute best figments of Max Booth’s imagination.
"What’s going on with this guy?"
"Oh, him?" Doctor Winzenread said. "That’s Zach. He’s terrible."
"What do you mean?"
She shrugged. "The sign is rather self-explanatory, I thought. He’s a piece of shit."
"But… he’s dead?"
"Even the dead can suck, Mr. Max."
The Dead Are Alive
One of the aspects of Maggots Screaming! that makes it much better than a novel about people watching themselves rotting away ought to be is the emotional depth of Max Booth’s writing. It ranges from the uncomfortably funny to the utmost serious and soulful. Sometimes on the same page. The best way I can describe it is if Todd Solondz decided to adapt (and spice up) a William Faulkner novel. Narrated by Dylan, the novel is very much about the divorce of his parents and the dislocation of his family.
Whether you ever experience divorce or not, you know what I’m talking about. That innocent struggle to understand that nothing will ever be the same anymore. The search for the unit that once cared and nurtured for you. Booth illustrates Dylan’s struggle literally through physical decay, but quest is existential and psychological. He needs to reconcile himself with the inherent fuckness of adults and the realization that no one knows what the fuck they’re doing. That’s how Maggots Screaming! manages to be so moving.
*
Maggots Screaming! is… one of the best things if not the best thing Max Booth III has ever written? I can’t quite believe it, but this is one of the most funny, original and profound novels I've read in quite some time. There’s a mastery to the style, themes and controlled chaos of Maggots Screaming! that isn’t in Booth’s earlier novels. Not even in the excellent The Nightly Disease. It’s coming out on April 12, but I highly, highly suggest you preorder it. I’m going 9 on this bad boy and I don’t even feel generous about it.
