Gods and Monster Roaches

By Tony Fonseca

01/17/2005

Gonzalez, J. F. That's All Folks! Alma, AR: Yard Dog Press, 2004. 58 p.

J. F. Gonzalez is no newbie to the world of horror fiction. He has published some half dozen novels including one of my personal favorites, Clickers (with Mark Williams, Dark Tales, 2000). The publication of two of his apocalyptic tales as a chapbook entitled That's All Folks! is proof that Yard Dog Press (www.yarddogpress.com) is more than just a small publisher that prints only unheard of writers who need a breakthrough.

That's All Folks! opens with an introduction by Gonzalez that is as entertaining and enlightening as either of the stories that follow. It not only explains the genesis of the tales, "Sending Them Home" and "House of the Damned," but it serves as a humorous manifesto of Gonzalez's political leanings. Being no Bush lover myself (in fact, I have advocated that if a woman in Maryland be forced to wear a sign that says "I stole gas," our President should be willing to wear a sign which reads "I lead us into a war that was a mistake," at least for one day), I am tickled to see a fellow lover of dark fiction express an avid distrust of Bush, the Christian Right, and even Karl Rove. To quote Gonzalez:

I've read more than theory that opined that Bush and his cronies (the Religious Right--or Reich, as I call them) are trying in their own way to "help" bring along Armageddon. Really. I'm not making this up. Investigate this on your own. Read about Karl Rove and Tim LaHaye and the history of the Christian Coalition. Scare the bejebbers out of you.

Granted, I cannot attest to the veracity of these theories, but they make interesting fodder for reading and for philosophical discussions on the front porches of average Americans, who REALLY should be talking about these kinds of things, instead of whether or not Teresa Heinz Kerry's "shove it" is equal to Dick Cheney's "go fuck yourself," in meaning or timbre.

But to the stories themselves:

"Sending Them Home" is quite an interesting piece, both for its demented philosophy and for its structure as a work of genre fiction. Told through notebook entries which are kept by a serial murderer (as soon as he can, after a murder, he sits down to write his thoughts, while they are fresh in his head), it tells of a twenty-something born again son of bikers who one day decides that his mission on God's earth is to literally send those fellow Christians home who express worldly fatigue and an immediate desire to be in heaven with Jesus. In other words, it's one of those "be careful what you wish for stories." But it works because we are allowed to see the development of killer Gary Z. Linneman, to better understand why he grows up to believe that murder could be in God's plan. Gonzalez also keeps the tale interesting by introducing a comical troop of holy rollers near the end, in a Pentecostal snake handling congregation, one of whose members turns out to be marked for Heaven by Linneman. This snake charmer/swamp mama turns out to be a real challenge for our killer, and in a scene reminiscent of The Terminator, keeps coming back from certain death to once again fight Linneman. He is caught, but like "House of the Damned," "Sending Them Home" is an apocalyptic tale, so it cannot end with one murderer being snagged. Instead, his notebook inspires others, who, because of their positions of power, have the ability to dream of creating cults of serial murderers, all of whom can be enlisted to help "bring Christians home" before the Four Horsemen emerge to lay waste to the world.

"House of the Damned" is an interesting experiment in modern horror fiction, but like all experiments in literature, it gets mired in its own form and isn't as effective as it could be. In it, Gonzalez sets out to write a Victorian horror tale with modern sensibilities. The narrator is having a drink at a local pub when he overhears two of the regulars talking about an incident where one of their sons had a roof fall in on him and was attacked by large black cockroaches. An elderly doctor named Hugh Cavanaugh overhears the conversation and is alarmed; he asks the men to bring the son in to talk to him. A few days later, they do, and they bring one of the roaches, which really sets off Cavanaugh's red flags. Cavanaugh then starts the tale within the tale, about his infantry unit's experience during World War II in the Philippines. His unit bunkered down in an abandoned house to avoid being found by the Japanese, and in the basement found four coffins, with corpses that had been staked. Around these coffins they also found millions of roaches, many of them of the large variety with huge mandibles that can draw blood. Needless to say, what Gonzalez creates here is a story of what would happen if roaches dined on vampire corpses. The vision becomes apocalyptic because in the present day time frame of the story, these roaches have finally made their way around the world. Now it's only a matter of time .

But unfortunately, a story about vampirism roaches is a modern tale, one that would be best told with a modern vehicle, rather than related via a Victorian style frame tale told in a pub by old men. You could say that relegating these unstoppable little monsters to this kind of a literary form sucks the life out of the story.

Nonetheless, to his credit Gonzalez is one of those writers who can interest a reader in his fiction because he knows how to write. I have always been impressed with his economy of words, and with the singularity with which he approaches a particular vision of a given horrifying fictional reality. That is what I liked about Clickers. Gonzalez is one of those writers who knows that a good story is one that either allows the monster to take center stage or one that keeps the emphasis on the humans who are destined to be that monster's next meal, with the creature always hiding in the wings, just waiting for its entrance into the spotlight.