Rotters by Daniel Kraus - review

I have been staring at this book for a while.

Thanks to Charlie Higson's The Enemy, I rescinded my No Zombies proclamation last year, and so, thinking Rotters was about zombies and emboldened by the Scott Westerfeld cover blurb, I brought it home.

Stared at it, thought the cover was bad, passed it off to my friend Chelsea to read. Chelsea is a fast reader and likes zombies just fine. When she finished it and passed it back to me, I asked her opinion. She said, "I don't know. I think you'd have to read it for yourself. It's not zombies though." Then I returned it to the library. Upon learning that I need to write a list of novels to suggest to readers who liked The Monstrumologist, I checked it back out.

And now I've read it. And I'm still staring at it.

I MEAN. You've got to be kidding me. It's a father-son bonding novel, kind of like Ghetto Cowboy (reviewed on Pink Me recently), only instead of the gruff father and the recalcitrant son taming each other while the boy learns to share his father's love and respect for horses, here we have lonely Joey getting to know his pathologically solitary father Ken and learning to stand up for himself while being tutored in the dirty, delicate art of - grave robbing.

It is also a how-low-can-you-go experimental novel, recalling And the Ass Saw the Angel, the least palatable and most transcendant of Nick Cave's mostly-unpalatable and often-transcendant novels. Both novels feature a descent into madness and a hell of a lot of organic decomposition. 

But the mud and the maggots and the gouged-out eyes and all this Dario Argento stuff is kind of just the trappings. Rotters is really about legacy, and changing traditions, and feeling trapped. There is a lot of talk about being buried alive, causing the reader to pay attention to themes of freedom versus conformity in the text.

Heck, you could write the same book about a family whose business was opera, only nobody would read it and there might be fewer murders.

It is more than worth one's while to click through to Daniel Kraus's author statement on Amazon. You know the opening credit sequence of True Blood? Those quick little snips of film that refer to our fascination with decomposition, consumption, birth, rebirth, devotion? Daniel Kraus is all about that.

I think - after a good deal of staring, as I say - I think that this book would make a really amazing graphic novel. I would like to see a lot of the descriptive text excised in favor of some knockout drawings. And god knows there are artboys out there who loooove to draw dead stuff.