The Nightclerk

by Stephen Schneck

In San Francisco there is a run-down hostelry where J. Spenser Blight, a balloon-shaped nightclerk presides. He whiles away the long night hours reading 25-cent paperback erotic epics; cutting up old magazines, and reminiscing about his impossibly beautiful and equally corrupt wife, Katy. He dwells on Katy's career as a caterer to the sex-fantasies of customers Blight brings home to her. Katy is arrested and Blight must rescue her in the manner of the Marx Bros. The Nightclerk by Stephen Schneck was winner of the Formentor Novel Prize.

Genres: Literature, Fiction

206 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Stephen Schneck was an American novelist and author of books on dog and cat care. He was also a screenwriter (including “Welcome to Blood City,” “High-Ballin’ ”, “Inside Out”, and “Across the Moon”) and tv scriptwriter (including “Cheers” ).

Reviews

[Periwinkle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so weird. I love it. I'm surprised more people haven't embraced it as a cult novel. I see it as parody of experimental novels. It is a series of surreal vignettes about a night-clerk in a San Francisco residence hotel. The book starts in mid-sentence, and is told in a Joyce-ean Burroughs-esque fashion. Fortunately, the writer is smart and very funny. So, it is not as dull as I make it sound.

[Beer Bolwijn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boy, that was a strange and wacky book. Not in a bad way though. It reminded me a bit of "V." by Thomas Pynchon, with overt innuendos aplenty and less brilliant. The nightclerk vibes in the hotel got me going, and I was reading with 5 stars eyes until the prostitution bit becomes the main focus for sooo long! The anecdotes were positively kooky and wacky etc, there just wasn't enough of a main thread to return to. And I wish there were more description of Frisco at night.

I'll have to check if the author wrote anything else, because I did enjoy the writing style a lot. Paragraphs transition seamlessly with clever play of words, and there's a wealth of advertisements, newspapers articles and other snippets that lend the book layers of depth. Almost as if you're reading a really really good comic in literature form.

P.S. The author's last name is so appropriate for the book!

[Jon]

When critic-novelist Alfred Chester referred to "the Grove Press epater-le-Post-Office machine", this was the type of book he had in mind. Ostensibly about a grossly overweight night clerk at a seedy San Francisco hotel in the mid-60s, this novel rapidly spins off into a series of decadent fantasies, some erotic, some just grotesque. I lived in sleazy SF hotels in the 80s and would have thought the reality of that situation would have given Schneck plenty to work with, but he apparently preferred weird fantasy to an even weirder--and more challenging--reality, so this book is a wasted opportunity. Schneck's second novel, NOCTURNAL VAUDEVILLE, about TV and Hollywood, is in some ways better than this one, since the artificiality of the Hollywood setting suited his artistic inclinations more than the topic of down-and-outers in San Francisco.

[jami sama · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book when I was a kid. Even then it wasn't so much scary as farcical and sarcastic. As one reviewer remarked; it did resemble several famous historical authors which made it even more of a parody. Even today close to 50 years later I still pay homage to the book when joking with friends and beginning a sentence with: and there he sits, the night clerk (insert grotesquery here). Very enjoyable read. I am scarred for life! BTW, I don't remember exactly when I read it.

[goop · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a shame that Schneck has a small list of works. His writing style and organization of content is intriguing and was the reason I read the book in the first place. On the contrary, this book is nothing other than vile. I expected a sexual satire as the main character works at a love hotel and regularly interacts with sexual deviants and lowlifes, but what I did not expect was the character to participate in the sex trafficking of minors and fetishized pedophilia. Not to mention, that his wife(albeit willingly) is constantly abused and degraded for the entirety of the book, in a fashion that even a pornography addict may feel inclined to cringe at. It's a shame that this book is so well-written, because the content within is morally depraved and truthfully left me wondering: "How did this get published?" I believe it's out of print for the reasons I gave such a low rating, and that in today's age it would be impossible to shelve in any major retailer's inventory.

[Tommaso Abbenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disturbante

[Terence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Free book from the library, Grove Press, and man it has some interesting moments. Very of its era, mid-1960s, but some great meanderings into fantasy.