This might be the most fucked up book I've ever read. It's extreme, it's vile, it's completely debauched and depraved, and, oh yeah, did I mention, it's completely -- I mean completely! -- fucked up? Because it is. I've heard about Edward Lee and how extreme he is, in much the same way I'd heard about the notoriety surrounding Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door. It's one thing to hear about something versus actually experiencing it, though.
I knew about the gag-inducing opening to The Pig, for instance, years before I finally, this week, cracked open my Kindle copy, and yet that opener really only scratches a small part of the surface of just how far Lee is willing, and so often does, go. And holy shit, does he ever go there, and then goes past it, leaving a long, terrible streak of blood, body parts, and seminal fluid in his wake.
Leonard is an aspiring film student who makes the stupid-ass decision to borrow $4,000 with 100% interest from the mafia so he can film his script and submit the movie to a film festival. When he can't pay back the eight large a week later, he's muscled into using his camera skills to make underground pornos for the mob starring a pair of skeezy, filthy, washed-up heroin addicts who can no longer turn tricks hooking as prostitutes for the crime family. Their co-stars range from dogs to mules and, of course, the titular pig, while Leonard is also forced to occasionally film the random scat, snuff, and necrophile feature. All of which Lee goes into exhaustingly graphic detail of, and with incredible gusto and rather a bit too much zeal for my tastes.
The second novella in this double-header, from which the book takes its title, The House, is set 30 years after the events detailed in The Pig. Melvin, a pencil-necked 33-year-old virgin, is assigned to write a feature on a house once used by the mob to film underground pornos and is reportedly very, very, very haunted. Melvin meekly takes the assignment and is coerced into taking his bombshell mother-in-law with him so she can work on her art in the woods and spend much of the book bare-ass naked, giving Lee plenty of opportunity to wax poetically about her pubic hair and big tits.
The House is a more serious affair than The Pig and oftentimes feels more sedate until Lee pulls the rug out from under you in an effort to shock and disgust. In The Pig, Lee spends damn near every page figuring out new ways to disturb and twist reader's stomachs with his very rapey scenes of blood-and-not-always-human-semen, but by the time he gets up to similar antics in The House such schtick has worn thin and feels tiresome more often than not. Or maybe I was just growing desensitized to, or perhaps more likely bored of, the lengths Lee goes in order to shock. I can only imagine the number of times Lee must have sat at his word processor wondering what filth to smear across the page next and then cackling in disturbed glee as a lightbulb moment hit.
For as much as you feel bad about and dirty, dirty, dirty from reading The House as a whole, Lee does somehow manage to keep an oddly spry lightness about it all. Deft humor and wry snarkiness worms its way through, and for as dark and icky as these two stories are, you can feel Lee having fun with it all, leavening the gross-out scenes with some witty zingers. He wants to push way past any boundary of good taste and leave it about a thousand miles in the rearview mirror and make you puke your guts out, but he also wants you to have a few laughs along the way. As if a little bit of sugar will help the Shake-A-Puddin' go down...