Book Review: Rapedome by Alan Houston

Rapedome
Alan Houston
(Astronaut Books)

(Full disclosure: the author of this novel is the ex-husband of a good friend of mine. This review is purely for my own interest, and not intended for promotional purposes).

I'm not a huge fan of shock fiction - you read one Chuck Palahniuk novel, you can plot out the next ones fairly easily. And while I appreciate postmodernism, I find most of the efforts in that direction dubious at best. Pynchon is an attention-starved bore; Vonnegut had a moment of brilliance and then got tweedy; Tom Robbins is annoyingly self-righteous and earnest. David Foster Wallace is a shining exception, but even he gets off on his own cleverness at times. Ultimately the cardinal sin of these authors is that, for all their razzle-dazzle, they forget to just shut up and tell a story.

Rapedome is different. Out of obscurity comes an author who finally makes postmodern literature fun.

Just from the title, you can tell Houston is here to rattle some cages. The plot revolves around a mysterious backwoods silo where all societal rules and roles are suspended, and in the slippery darkness its participants engage in the worst trespasses imaginable. Some are blackmailed into coming, others kidnapped; some just show up looking to party. All are irrevocably changed by the experience. Though the point of view jumps from one character to another, it often lingers on several bizarre characters: the hypersexual and dangerous Lola; the psychotic kindergarten teacher Peter; the idiot President of the United States, Ginesap; and the mysterious, melancholy billionaire creator of the Rapedome itself. Along the way these characters are perpetrators and victims of rape, assault, murder, pedophilia, and Japanese game shows. And it's all funny as hell.

Houston is definitely here to poke fun at every single societal more and taboo he encounters, from feminism to civil rights to sexual identity, but his jabs are more winking than cruel. They're just par for the course - the reader bought their ticket when they read past the cover. And yet for a shock novel, the writing is surprisingly mature - the author isn't here to say, "See? See? I made a dooky on the carpet! Whaddaya think of that, huh?!" Where Pynchon would insert another chorus line to get himself out of a literary pickle, Houston keeps the ball rolling with crazed focus. One gets the sense of a narrative game of Mousetrap: it's Rube Goldbergian in execution, but care is taken to direct the reader from one outrageous situation to the next, to make sure nothing gets stale or repetitive. It's telling that Rapedome is so short, compared to its bloated predecessors; Houston actually listened to his editor, it seems. In a maximalist genre, tight prose can make the experience much more satisfying.

The only bad thing about Rapedome is its ending. Imagine a brilliant, raucous party where the host suddenly glances at his watch, stops everything, and spends five minutes elucidating dryly on the dangers of alcohol abuse. This sudden moralizing is only vaguely relevant, and leaves the reader scratching their head. Topping it off is the bizarre non-sequitur of a divine apparition. Is it Deus Ex Machina? An inside joke? Was this foreshadowed some pages back? It all feels hastily thrown together.

Thankfully the last few pages are so inconsequential, they have no bearing on the enjoyment which preceded them. This Wile E. Coyote-like spin through a mad but well-organized mind will leave you giggling and breathless. Rapedome knows it's audacious, funny, and blisteringly weird. Maybe its comment on the "darkness behind society" isn't especially original, but Houston certainly knows how to use it. I look forward to this author's next works, of which I hope there will be many more to come.

Final Verdict: 4 out of 5.

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