Clump: An American Splatire

by S. Redman White

CLUMP reads like a head-on collision between Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and Chuck Palahniuk. Clump is a man with no name, no past and, most importantly, no head. The huge, heavily muscled giant lacks any awareness of the world around him, but miraculously becomes the most popular entertainer in America. Clump's medical and media handlers must manage his skyrocketing career as a music video star and create a wholesome, family-friendly public image...while concealing the inconvenient fact that the headless man is homicidally dangerous when touched.A so-called "splatire" owing to the mix of razor-sharp comedy and graphic violence, CLUMP's satiric targets include the entertainment industry, medicine, journalism, corporate greed and ineptitude, politics, and a morally vacuous culture that increasingly and enthusiastically embraces the brainless.This scathingly hilarious novel is not for the faint-hearted, the thin-skinned, or the unadventurous but is an all-you-can stomach buffet for those who like their comedy dark and their social commentary barbed.

318 pages, Paperback

Published June 12, 2011

Reviews

[Erin Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one of the most unusual books I have ever read. It is very, very funny in a dark and grotesque kind of way. I don't think it's for everyone but I really enjoyed it and laughed out loud several times. Clump is a headless, brainless, superbly fit man who becomes internationally famous through the manipulation of the media. I can see Quentin Tarantino making a movie of this story. It would be over the top with violence and satire - horrifying in a can't look away from the train wreck kind of way. I highly recommend this book for those who are not too squeamish when it comes to violence. It also helps if you have a twisted sense of humor. This book is weird fun.

[Priscilla King · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably I shouldn't have liked this book. It is a guy's book, for guys, with lots of explosions and things that go splat, many involving body parts, and lots of what is now known as safe sex but used to be illegal in several States. And all the characters get hurt, and all of them end up dead, but somehow the women seem to get hurt more than the men do. Maybe it's the old Catholic "suffering here may save you time in Purgatory" idea, but it seems to me that the tough, sweet little nurse pays more dearly for a few moments of revenge than the fraud doctor does for years of nastiness. Lawyer Crunt, whose private business is called Withanar, really is a horrorcow but what happens to her is definitely more gruesome than what happens to other cynical and mean-spirited characters. (It's a satire. There are no really nice characters, though the nurse and two orderlies who work with her come close.) There is a LOT of violence and gross-outs in this book. There are also really witty remarks, like the deadly review of a book that "had many chapters." Maybe it's the not-funny scenes of gore and mayhem that made me laugh out loud at the funny lines: comic relief.

This novel gets full points for diversity in casting. The movie, if made, will look like America, with ranges of nicer and nastier characters of all types. It might be hard to sell a movie that relies as heavily on violently maimed bodies as this book does, these days, but the diverse casting is credible (even if the big orderly's Southern accent does read as a conscious self-parody).

And yes, it has many chapters. This is not one of those Amazon mini-books where somebody relied on Chatbot to fill in thirty thousand, count them, words. This is a full-length book that a real professional writer wrote at some great unreadable length and then carefully cut down.

The question this book asks and, speculatively, answers, is: What if a man could survive having his head cut off, as some birds do? To provide a plot, the man whose head has been reduced to a minimal clump of mouth and ganglial tissues, who gets the nickname Clump, has been a bodybuilder and maintains terrific size, strength, and muscle tone and definition, even after his near death, by straining against restraints, lashing out violently if touched, and doing an odd combination of workout and dance when he feels a rhythmic beat through the floor. He gets sold to a terribly tasteless movie maker who does his bit, but in the end it's Clump himself who will make Clump a star. Literally.

If this review has not totally turned you off this book, then you'll probably love it.