Duet for the Devil

by T. Winter-Damon, Randy Chandler, Edward Lee (Introduction)

"I have just finished reading Duet for the Devil... A very scary and poetic noir look at that darkest of serial killers, the Zodiac..."


- Don Webb, author of Endless Honeymoon
from St. Martin's Press


"Chaotic, grotesque, and chimerical, Duet For The Devil is a corpse-filled tidal wave of LSD-spiked Kool-Aid crashing down and washing away all fragile sensibilities. Winter-Damon and Chandler are the Siamese twin-bastard sons of Burroughs, Pynchon, Barthelme and de Sade. The authors delight in erudite fireworks that confound the reader even while evoking an astounding realization of bizarre and hideous wonder. Perversely constructed with a taste for literary deconstruction, this novel is charged with an inextricable intensity and distorted perception you're not likely to find anywhere else ever again."


- Tom Piccirilli, author of Hexes,
The Night Class and The Deceased


"Is it gross? Hell, yes. It's grosser than anything I've ever written or ever read... It's a fictional foray into the purview of some of the things that most cause us to wonder about what we -- as a society -- are giving birth to... Serial murder, sexual dementia, undiluted sociopathy, violence as pasttime... and all the other details of the darkest trimmings of the human heart... It delves into taboos so mind-boggling that the likes of Richard Ramirez and Richard Speck would be jealous, and it does so with an eagerness of vision and an energy to offend. I welcome this, because that which offends us also provokes us... to think.


"It's a piece of ultimately wicked art. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer meets L.A. Confidential meets Angel Heart."


- Edward Lee, from the introduction
to Duet For The Devil

Genres: Horror

ebook

First published October 1, 2000

Reviews

[Hail Hydra! ~Dave Anderson~ · Rating 5 out of 5]

“MY DESIRES SHALL BECOME FLESH, MY DREAMS REALITY & NO FEAR SHALL ALTER IT!”
“Hystera!
“Ialbadaoth!
“Baphomet!
“Thanateros!
“In nomine Dei nostri Satanas Luciferi excelsi!
“The Day of Mankind has ended, The Time of Mancruel is at hand… AVE SATANAS! ALL HAIL BLUE DEVIL! & BID WELCOME THE APOCALYPSE—
“In the name of Satan, the Ruler of the earth, the King of the world, I command the forces of Darkness to bestow their Infernal power upon Me!
“Open wide the gates of Hell & come forth from the abyss to greet Me as your brother & friend!
“By all the Gods of the Pit, I command that these things of which I speak shall come to pass!

[Shawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggled quite a bit with this book (to paraphrase Donald Fagen "...so sue me if this goes too long") but I do feel as if I want to give it its due - for the sake of those only looking for a "read it/don't read it" review, let's foreground that short version... and then I'll say my piece at length (with my usual penchant for parenthetical abuse).

I do not feel this book was successful at what it was trying to do. It struck me as ambitious and heartfelt, but also mediocre and sloppy. Some (but not all) of that can be chalked up to it originally having been a 900 page text chopped down to a salesworthy length, and some (but not all) of that may be due to my personal and subjective love of short fiction and my disdain for overblown modern novels. If you're considering reading DUET FOR THE DEVIL, this is, in short, what you're going to get: a roughly 320 page hybrid pulp-noir/splatterpunk/bizarro novel with numerous plot-threads (some of which do not get resolved) but mostly focused on:

the decades-long cross-country murder, rape and torture spree of 3 Occult/Satanic serial killers (think THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, but with better planning), the leader of whom is the original super-genius Zodiac of San Francisco.

their decades long pursuit by an obsessed, ex-FBI private detective who suffers Vietnam War flashbacks (think loads of old noir films and modern 70's exploitation films).

the involvement of a big-money, corporate criminal organization in the world-wide, occult/sadist/snuff/designer-drug underground with major influence, high technology and moneyed kill-squads at the ready (think Maury Terry's The Ultimate Evil).

a drug-mutated, telepathic, performance-art super-killer out to wreak chaos (think VIDEODROME meets SCANNERS).

and pages and pages and pages (and pages!) of intimately detailed and described torture, rape, pedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia, reams and reams of "visionary" occult theory.... topped off with an underwhelming ending.

Fans of modern Splatterpunk and Bizarro with an interest in "transgressive writing" (and a high tolerance for repetition and child-rape) might dig this novel. Might. It's not a completely terrible book and it certainly is ambitious, but it didn't strike me as successful in achieving all, or even most, of its goals (or what I presume they were). And that's my even-handed short-version.

And now... the more detailed version (perhaps, cheekily, in the mode of the book's circuitous excesses). Will it be worth it? You decide for yourself but the TLDR generations can bail here. I'm doing this because no one else on Goodreads seemed to want to grapple with a long-form review.

I'll try to be fair here but this will take some time. This showed up about a year after it came up on my random "to-read" list (probably because of the Zodiac connection), and so I had requested it from inter-library loan, assumed it was a no-show and completely forgot about it. It came at a time of year when I'm swamped with other deadlined reading and it needed to be returned by a certain date. It's a modern novel (not a form I love), ostensibly a "splatterpunk" novel (not a genre I pursue much - although I'm not a prude re: extreme violence - more on this later) and, as I said before, seems to have been a magnum opus of the author trimmed down to novel length, so those are some strikes against it from the get go.

On the other hand, I seem to share with T. Winter-Damon a number of favorite authors (William S. Burroughs,J.G. Ballard)/artists (surrealists)/filmmakers (David Cronenberg, Dario Argento)/influences (vague interests in occult theory/culture - but not practice - and existence of serial killers - although it's been decades since I exercised or even indulged those interests as I kind of burned out on them) and do have an interest in the pop-culture surrounding San Francisco's Zodiac killer (although my own opinion of the case is decidedly at odds with most armchair internet "experts" and would be considered underwhelming by aficionados) and serial killers in general (although not of the "aren't these guys extreme and cool, dude?" type and more in folklore reflections - urban and classic, how the concept infiltrated popular culture - anyone remember A CURRENT AFFAIR? Thanks, FOX! - and my ongoing interest in the cultural need for a modern, revised demonology), so I wasn't completely at odds in where this book's central idea was coming from and willing to play along (although I think that Maury Terry's general theory is about 50% hooey and part of the Reagen-Era, Evangelical-recruiting psy-ops program that was run on the U.S. & U.K. media in the 80's to consolidate power and fleece big money from dumb, wealthy Christians through fear) and it could certainly make for a thrilling novel.

But, as I said, I'm also a big of fan of short-fiction and if I read novels I tend to read older ones, as I find most modern novels either thin in actual content while bloated with soap-operatic characters and "incidents" (most modern pop novels) or overblown excuses for endless philosophical bloviating (most modern lit novels) - life's too short and all that (it's why I also don't read many - if any at all - series novels). And while I like experimental or visionary writing (the dadaists and surrealists, Burroughs cut-up novels, The Atrocity Exhibition) it has to have certain personal, subjective qualities for me (a place in history or a sense of humor are two thumbs up attributes) or else we're trapped in that whole "sound and fury signifying nothing" area where the author is either being too clever by half (which isn't *always* bad, but I have to be in the mood and it's usually too dry, intellectual and "look at me" - at least OULIPO has a sense of humor most of the time!) or over-assuming the reader's tolerance level for reams of decidedly subjective material (the only thing more boring than someone telling you about their dreams is them telling you about their psychedelic trips - here expanded to - or their abstract occult theory). I'm willing to get carried away on an excessive, visionary trip - even a hyper-violent one - if the writing is (pardon the pun) up to snuff but there never seemed to be the sense of stylistic rhythm here that marks the best of such writing (like, say, Thomas Pynchon's odd but engaging tick-tock).

And then there's the endlessly detailed violence and sexual abuse. Here, the modern, calculatedly "transgressive" artist holds most of the critical cards - the reader gets the dichotomy of either being appalled (the effect being sought, as it leads to great publicity and the media machine getting kicked into gear) or numbed and dismissive (thus proving the artist's point about our jaded culture of violence and yadda-yadda-yadda...) and I guess my reaction was the latter - but sheerly out of the wearisome repetition of it all. Put another way - I like Cronenberg and Argento's use of calculated, extreme violence and viciousness because it's utilized in a methodical, artistic schema (no matter how chaotic it may seem in the moment) while I have no time for sniggering exercises in excess like the GUINEA PIG films or BAD TASTE's slapstick gore and the like. Anyone can throw extreme sadism around to shock (just as one can easily evoke Nazi death camps to shock) but without a grounding in plot, character and structure such gestures are hollow and reek of juvenility, especially when presented as deep or representative of some greater truth or culture comment (again, Sade at least had a sense of humor and, when lacking that, the true drive of an obsessive). The most effecting and effective fiction writing I ever read utilizing these elements (of sexual assault, sadism and violence) was the "Tralala" sections of Hubert Selby Jr.'s LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN and everything here (while far more "awful" in an objective sense) barely packs half the punch of those awful, awful and profoundly sad segments of that book. And here, everything will be described and almost nothing will be felt.

So I hated the book then? Right?

Well, no, actually - every once in a while there are real moments of power, an effective character bit or section of writing, a narrative or descriptive turn or scenario that pays off. All of this should be taken with a grain of salt - the book has a lot going against it, so even effective moments in the reading are squandered or undeveloped or obliterated by repetition that causes them to wear out their welcome. And a lot of the good work is undone by serious tone control problems - the detective sections want to be 40's Jim Thompson noir-pulp with all the corners cut for speed and so when there's a (very enjoyable) crescendo of over-the-top, lurid violence reached in the "piranha tanks at the Mermaid Inn" sequence, which reads like something out of an old SPIDER pulp magazine, it's undercut by how cliched the detective seems a lot of the time ("he's a private dick" we're told immediately - cue saxophone wail) - if you can even argue that a knowing, overripe pulp tone can be cliched - never meshing well with the "coldly calculating" sadistic killer stalking scenes, the cyberpunkish visionary bits involving telepathic-mega-killer Slice or even the odd moments of humor (the Laurel and Hardy-sque cop duo) or tongue in cheek satire (I really liked super-assassin Pynchon when he was introduced and, for a brief span, the book felt like a grimier [in]version of the tongue-in-cheek universe of Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan). I enjoyed some of the beat-inspired "mad road driving" highway descriptions, but then they just kept going and going. Ditto for the info-dump occult pattern theorizing (I did like the idea of a reverse Gnostic Sophia figure). Hell, even some of the Absurdist humor and obscure pop-culture references made me smile (THE CRIMSON EXECUTIONER, THE WIZARD OF GORE, Rexall drugs, Mark Blankfield's pharmacist character from FRIDAYS, four flies crawling on grey velvet, some solid jazz and classic rock references) even when they came out of nowhere (what modern cop in 2000 is name-dropping INNER SANCTUM?). The late-in-the-novel eliding of key plot moments or characters built up previously (like Professor Punk's daring coma plan or the final fate of the bible salesman), the dropping of whole plot threads (Slice takes on the world and, I assume, was heading for a FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF-MAN styled monster-rally battle against Zodiac), and the underwhelming ending (seriously, a femme fatale?) - all of which can be chalked up to the massive editing-down the manuscript underwent (which didn't stop an entire page getting repeated in my copy - Slice at the mirror talking to... whoever in his head) but which also feel like a calculated ploy towards a sequel - ruined many of the small aspects I enjoyed. But still, every once in a while - a nicely macroscopic zoom-out to a satellite dying in orbit and backgrounding events in Florida as it plunges through the atmosphere, the aforementioned hysteria-pitched piranha tank scene, the concept of serial-killing as direct-action revolt against consensus culture - the book showed me something more than just the endless sadism, racism and bilious misanthropic worldview that was its default stock-in-trade (almost every background character is a slavering cretin, gang-banger, sadist, moron or hypocrite - Louis Ferdinand Céline or Brother Theodore might applaud).

Because really (seriously and unemotionally for a moment) how many times can you describe child (or any) molestation/rape in excruciatingly cruel detail ("brutally pummeled orifices" and "onanistically" get thrown around a bit) before the reader starts skimming and begins to wonder whether the presumable cri de coeur about how we treat the most powerless in our society isn't really just a pose and serving to mask a vile, pornographic stroke-book for violent pedophiles? Less is more, man, and sometimes nothing fails like excess (of course in the defensive introduction you get the usual shuck-and-jive about "exploring limits")! The same goes for the endless gun fetishism, and overall near-obsessive detail about the most unimportant things. No one can turn off a car, cock their gun and walk across a parking lot - they have to "remove the finely sculptured ignition key from the Dodge's 325 chrome-plated housing and, as the 12 cylinder rattles to a stop, its finely tuned 325 cam pistons resting in their nests like machined batons, swing open the solid, Detroit-steel passenger door and chamber a round in their....." and on and on and on! People don't remember things - "neurons fire at nerve endings in the depths of their back-brains, setting off a cascade of images that rise through the mental smoke of the day, grasping their way towards visualization as they snap and claw....". No make or model will go unnoted, no clothing undescribed, no stray thought unvoiced! No wonder the initial document was 900 pages long!

So it was completely awful then?

Well, no. Because, here's the thing - underneath it all you can feel that that author was really trying for something, persistent and determined, really reaching and willing to exceed his grasp. But, damn he needed an editor and someone to not be a yes-man and kill or excise whole sections and call him on the bullshit. But it didn't happen. The idea to present a fictionalized version of Terry's "America under serial-terror satanic assault" was not a bad one, and Zodiac as conceived and represented in the book is a compelling character (in the sk-as-supervillain mode. Seriously, being Zodiac doesn't seem like a whole lot of fun, as you have to be endlessly triple-checking your every move for evidential slip-ups, roaming the country burying caches of weapons and driving halfway across state to buy a newspaper at a place no one has ever seen you before - who's bankrolling this? Some super-satanic cult, I guess) but there's just so much extraneous text to be trimmed that it wears the reader out. It could have benefited from more tone control (more effectively merging the pulpier and brutally real sections), and a less fractured narrative (seriously reigning in the heady and febrile stuff), tightened dialogue (some is just awful and clunky) and some attention (for all the indulgence paid to other details) to solidly setting it in time frame (I was shocked when it turned out to be taking place in modern times, circa 2000, and not in the 1980s as I presumed from some details like a Walkman and a fax machine) and trusting its audience. It occurred to me at one point that a good blueprint for the book would be as a deliberate, chaotic anti-police procedural where every action was illustrated to show how the processes of detection and logic lazily relied on by the "rational mind" could be undone or defused by over-thinking and out-thinking, all working towards some higher level of chaos (fraying the bonds of order from their top-side and bottom-side simultaneously). Perhaps a contrast between cold, controlled exteriors and lurid sensory interior input blossoming back out into the world as hideous violence. But these are all musings and the book had other plans - but I don't think I'm just complaining about "the book I expected but didn't get", I'm extrapolating out from the text given to what it *seems to want to be* but just keep hamstringing itself from becoming.

So, in the end, it almost struck me as some modern version of a Eugène Sue Gothic horse-choker like THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS - endless lurid details stuffed into a meandering, labyrinthine plot going nowhere fast at a breathless pace. An indulgent, messy, overwrought, goofy and trangressively earnest (in its own odd way), enthusiastic, audacious, trashy, lysergic gush of pulp - sound and fury kind of seeming to signify something but not signifying much of anything at all in the end.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contains some wonderful poetic writing and clever use of language, and all kinds of interesting erudite references, but also full of graphic violence and horror. Definitely not for the weak of stomach or heart.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is confusing at times, but it is very extreme. It never lets up on the violence. This is only for seasoned extreme horror readers.

[Joseph Matheny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will Hollywood ever make this into a movie, like say...Silence of the Lambs? Well, no. The reasons? They don't have the guts. (Rob Zombie, are you listening?)

Chilling read that pushes the envelope in ways others never dared. Not for the faint of heart for sure. Also, read this intro that got left out: http://archive.today/bOsqx

[Allan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to rate. Was it shocking? Not really although it had it's gross outs that include rape and incest. Was it scary? Nope but it was well written and pretty well researched. Was it enjoyable? Not bad at all.

[Alessandro Hand-glider-Hawthorn · Rating 5 out of 5]

original review:
Loved the Zodiac and His group. Loved Slice. The violence was glorious. At times, the writing was beautiful, which was rather surprising but welcomed. Confusing, ambitious splatter. Personally the 20(ish) pages (I think?) of child rape and incest got a bit boring and didn't really do anything for me. I would have liked more gore. Will re-read and update this review.

reread:
will i do a new review for my reread? will i remember?
anyway, its so much better on second read :D
one of the best (if not the best) pieces of extreme/just any literature ever
at least in the first half
the second half, tho not bad, lost me kinda
i still dont understand much of whats happening at all

[David Tamarin · Rating 5 out of 5]

What to say about this book? One of the most brutal, hardcore, transgressive, sick, deviant novels ever created. Writers Randy Chandler and T Winter Damon do their best to demolish your mind with this bloody re-telling of the Zodiac Killer murders. There is a detective hunting him down, and this detective is the nominal good guy, and even he is a sick deviant bastard. Zodiac travels around with a sick maniac and his daughter with whom he has an incestusous relationship. Ed Lee in the intro says it is grosser than anything he has ever read or written. It has a noir style, and pays respects to its influences from Lautremont to Dr. Adder