Captain Blood

by Michael Blodgett

Beneath the "good life" veneer of Los Angeles, in an urban wasteland of drugs and death, a brutal enforcer stalks. An unforgiving avenger who strikes hard against killers, junkies, pimps, and pushers. He is an obsessed, self-appointed champion well versed in the art of murder, dispensing his own brand of justice to those who have broken his personal laws. Prepare to enter his nightmare world--for his vengeance is swift and savage, and his final reward is blood...

Genres: Horror, Literature

401 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Michael Blodgett was born on January 1, 1940 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Blodgett attended the University of Minnesota and began his acting career in his hometown of Minneapolis. Michael earned a law degree in political science from Cal State Los Angeles and attended Loyola Law School for a year. Blodgett quit acting in the late 70s and became a successful novelist and screenwriter. He penned the novels "Captain Blood", "Hero and the Terror" and "The White Raven". In addition, he either wrote or co-wrote the scripts for the Chuck Norris action vehicle "Hero and the Terror" (1988) , the hit comedy "Turner & Hooch" (1989), "Rent-a-Cop" (1987), "Run" (1991), and "The White Raven" (1998). Michael Blodgett died at age 67 from a heart attack on November 14, 2007.

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

The blurb on the back cover really nails this book perfectly:

"Captain Blood's insanity is the same mania for morality and justice that pollutes the spirits of the protagonists in Taxi Driver and Death Wish. There are no innocent victims in Captain's trail."

Where to even start with this? Our titular Captain Blood (yes, that is his real name) manages an apartment complex in L.A.; between that and a trust fund, he lives pretty well. But what kind of life? Well, alcohol plays a large role, as does sex, and truth be told, Captain is a sociopathic, racist asshole.

Captain Blood is a bit difficult to get into; the novel starts with Captain getting up, boozing and playing with his cock in front of a mirror while dropping racist slurs for the first few pages. Whew. He was awakened due to the crying he heard down the hall and eventually he investigates, bringing along some brandy, vodka and a beer. The widowed Mrs. Pearlstein, after Captain basically barges into her place and plies her with booze, confesses that the crying jag arose due to the steam iron she recently purchased is broken, and the store will not exchange it or give a refund. Well, Captain decides to do something about that!

While the entire narrative (from our most unreliable narrator) takes place in only a week or so, the many flashbacks serve to flesh out Captain's life, from when he was a child under the spell of his wealthy father (a doctor), to boarding school, college and beyond. His current romantic interest is his older sister Iris and yeah, expect lots of hot incest sex. The two have even been 'married' several times! The cover blurb mentions Captain Blood's sense of morality and justice and that is what propels the novel along. Dismayed at the modern world, the pollution, the filth, politicians on the take, Captain Blood does what is in his power to 'make things right' and this about midway turns into a nasty revenge epic. Unrelenting to say the least. Blodgett takes you into the mind of Captain Blood and it is not a very nice place to be. I might have gone higher in the rating here as this did prove pretty captivating once it got going, but the explicit racism and the hot incest made my skin crawl. 3 bloody stars!

[Oliver Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very strange, very 70s book that’s packed with sex (often weird sex) and violence. The plot is a fairly straight forward revenge tale, but the writing makes it feel complicated at times. The first half did drag a little at times, and it’s definitely a book I had to settle into, but the final third is a whale of a time.

[oddo · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars.

A rumination of 70s decadence and hyperviolent splatter, Michael Blodgett's debut novel Captain Blood (1979) is difficult to process and even more so to articulate into collected, ordered thoughts. Michael Blodgett, a noted character actor in the 70s, featured in films such as Beneath the Valley of the Dolls, writing such films as Turner & Hooch, retired from the camera in 1976 after what he admits was the result of a bad experience. Michael Blodgett took up the pen instead and set out to exorcise his copper-toned demons in this, his debut novel, Captain Blood. The novel was finished in 1977 but wouldn't be released until 1979 due to prerelease controversy. Captain Blood would then draw the attention and praise from Mario Puzo, the author best known for The Godfather (1969). When it was finally released, this endorsement would catapult Captain Blood onto the best-selling book charts, never mind the transgressive nature of a title like this, something akin to proto-splatter. Set in a shimmering, sun-soaked 70s Los Angeles, the plot follows a younger man named Captain Blood—his father being a huge Errol Flynn fan—and his misadventures in dismantling a West Coast Heroin consortium by way of torture, mutilation, and murder. From the jump, Captain Blood asserts himself as an unreliable narrator, one with innumerable mental illnesses, a cocktail of noxious narcissism, swallowed by the self-appointed vigilante-cum-executioner. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that author Jeff Linsday took inspiration from Captain Blood when he wrote Darkly Dreaming Dexter (2004), the source novel for the hit Showtime series. Still, it's that god complex of Captain Blood's that Blodgett focuses on, something that seems to tie directly into the threads of the narrative, with an opening page; a dream sequence that begs to be reread after finishing the novel—it's here on this page, the dark, beating heart of Captain Blood, for all its pleasant cruelties. For the uncensored text, you'll need to locate a Stonehill Publishing Company edition, as Bantam would make dozens of edits to its mass market paperback galley proof, altering everything from mentions of Queen (the band) to stripping much of the brutality from the sequences of violence and shortening the many scenes of explicit, pornographic, sex—choosing to mute the once-screaming descriptions instead and silencing the roar of the author. Your options for reading the unaltered text—that I know of—are the Stonehill Publishing Company hardback first edition or the New English Library (NEL) paperback. Captain Blood is a transgressive oddity of fiction and deserves to be rediscovered. It's a novel of so many things, taken far past the point of excess. Bikini briefed sun-tanned, polo-tucked-into-short-shorts, serial-killing vigilantism, a god-shocked interpretation of what I'd liken to a grindhouse Miami Vice episode, laden with incest, malaise, mentions of bestiality, leaving no stone unturned when it comes to diabolical paraphilias. What's so terrifying is how likable Captain Blood is at times. There's wry humor to be found, even on the darkest pages. Blodgett excels in building Captain to be this intimidating monolith of toxic masculinity, peeling back the veil slowly to reveal bared teeth highlighting the corner of a welcoming but demonic grin. Just about every kind of warning comes with this one. For example, a scene of torture within describes a helmet/cage apparatus containing a starving sewer rat fastened to a character's head, with a removable partition allowing the rat to devour the victim's face while they are bound. Continue at your own risk.

[John Welsh · Rating 3 out of 5]

The late 70s was a strange time.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This books sucks on so many levels, but I'm giving it five stars because I know someone is going to love it. It'll be that person who loves to talk up lost "classics," which have usually been forgotten for good reason; that person who watches certain movies because they're so bad they're good; that person who scoffs at Hemingway, Faulkner, and Updike, but won't shut up about how great, well, Captain Blood is. This book is terribly written and terribly structured, yet it dragged me along to the bitter end, mostly because I couldn't believe what was happening and wanted to see how much crazier it would get. And the answer was: Really crazy. There's also the fact that it's set in '70s L.A., a place and time that interest me. It's basically a Jim Thompson-esque slog through the mind of a psychopath written by an author with none of Thompson's sly wit or natural talent. The buddy who turned me onto it says he's heard that people read their favorite passages from it aloud at parties. I can see that; it's that kind of bad. If this sounds like your thing, read it, but don't tell anyone I told you to.

[Len Appleby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Blodgett (1939 – 2007) grew up in Minnesota, moved to California as a young man, and became an actor, with his most prominent role that of portraying Lance Rocke in the 1970 film ‘Beyond the Valley of the Dolls’.

Blodgett wrote a number of screenplays and three novels: ‘Captain Blood’ (1979), ‘Hero and the Terror’ (1982), and ‘The White Raven’ (1986).

‘Captain Blood’ has a complicated publishing history. Blodgett finished his manuscript in 1977, but its pornographic and splatterpunk content deterred many publishers from accepting the manuscript. Not until 1979 did Blodgett find a small press publisher, Stone Hill Publishing Co., willing to release a hardcover edition. The book gained enough exposure for Harmony Books to release a trade paperback version in 1982, complete with a cover blurb from Mario Puzo.

In March, 1986 Bantam Books released a mass market paperback version (358 pp); Blodgett made minor changes to the this edition (such as substituting a song that the lead character overhears from Queen’s ‘We Are the Champions’, to Madonna's song ‘Like A Virgin’).

Because all three editions of the book are long out of print, and because it has acquired something of a cult status, existing copies that come up for sale have steep asking prices.

'Captain Blood' is set in Southern California in the mid-80s. The titular hero (or antihero, if you prefer) is a clean-cut young man who manages an apartment complex. Named by his brilliant, eccentric physician father for the lead character from the novel by Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood’s outward normality conceals the fact that he mentally ill. Paranoid schizophrenia, mania, obsessive-compulsive disorder, alcoholism, psychopathic tendencies....... you name it, Captain Blood suffers from it.

The opening chapters of the novel are plodding, as Captain decides to take one of his tenants, a middle-aged Jewish lady, out to his favorite fern bars where they commingle with the oddball Southern California personalities haunting said fern bars. There is a lot of dialogue, as well as inner monologue segments designed to apprise the reader of Captain Blood's erratic personality.

Blodgett does insert a flashback sequence that touches on racial violence, and gives the narrative enough of a push to keep the reader moderately engaged.

At its midpoint, ‘Captain Blood’ transitions locales to a beachfront condo and introduces Captain’s lubricious sister Iris, and (in keeping with the idea that you can't have too many crazies in Southern California) Iris's psychotic lesbian lover Datchel. The pornographic and splatterpunk content kick into much higher gear.

The plot then transitions into its ‘revenge’ component, as Captain is informed of a rebellious teen-aged girl who is in the grip of drug addiction, and prostituted by group of down and dirty Inland residents.

The final third of the novel is the best, as Captain’s increasingly unhinged pursuit of the drug pushers brings out his lust for vigilante violence. The closing chapters offer genuine suspense, and a denouement that avoids contrivance.

The verdict ? For a first novel, ‘Captain Blood’ has its faults, but it does succeed in conveying a clear, and in many ways weirdly affectionate, portrayal of early-80s Southern California and its more crazed inhabitants.

Blodgett regularly suspends his narrative to offer quasi-cinematic sequences that describe the often smogbound, but sometimes idyllic, landscape of the Southern California, as if to say that for all its craziness, there is no better place to be on a clear and sunny spring morning.

'Captain Blood' also stands as a definitive work of proto-splatterpunk, in many ways eclipsing many – if not all - of the novels referenced as touchstones of the genre in Paul M. Sammons’s 1991 anthology Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror.

If 'extreme' craziness literature appeals to you, then picking up a copy of ‘Captain Blood’ can be worthwhile.

[Andrew Neilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can promise you one thing , you've never read a book like Captain Blood. You might not like it but every chapter throws you a surprise in this violent and extremely perverse revenge novel. Not only is our protagonist a full blown psychopath I actually suspect the writer of being unhinged when he wrote this. Or at the very least on mind altering drugs. But be warned the sexual antics of our main character is not for the easily offended.
So you can keep your Patrick Bateman. This is my American Pyscho.

[Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read in the 80s

[Bob Box · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read in 1986. A novel of epic revenge. One of my favorites that year.