Slob

Chaingang #1

by Rex Miller

Stephen King hails Rex Miller as "terrifying and original". Slob is his debut novel, the story of a man who thinks of himself as Death. A man wholikes to feast on human hearts, spilling blood wherever he goes. Jack Eichord is the detective who must hunt this human monster and genius killer. Years of working as a homicide detective for the Chicago Police department has hardened Eichord to things that would make most men turn and flee. But even he is not prepared for the labyrinthine search underground, as he trails the killer and his hostages through the sewer system of the city. Eichord thinks that he is beginning to understand thediabolical man and his patterns of violence...but can he guess the next victim in time, before it is too late for the woman he loves?

Genres: Horror, Crime, Serial Killer, Splatterpunk, Thriller, Fiction, Novels

1 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Rex Miller Spangberg was a DJ and horror novelist, best known for his "Detective Jack Eichord" books.

Reviews

[Kemper · Rating 2 out of 5]

Treasure of the Rubbermaids 4: The Sound of the Men Working on the Chain Gang

The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously stored and forgotten at my parent’s house and untouched for almost 20 years. Thanks to my father dumping them back on me, I now spend my spare time unearthing lost treasures from their plastic depths.

Even though it’s been over twenty years I remember why I bought this book. Back in the pre-Internet days if you didn’t live in a large city books didn’t get a lot of media attention. So when the nearest mid-sized city paper had an article about an author, and his book was described as new gory crime/horror series featuring an outlandish villain that had been endorsed by the likes of Stephen King and Harlan Ellison, it got my attention. If I remember correctly, the author was from Missouri, and it was getting treated as a local-boy-makes-good story so somebody was smart enough to stock his book at the local Waldens so I got a copy fairly easily.

Unfortunately, Rex Miller was ahead of his time. He created a character so gruesome and despicable that he would have fit in better in the torture porn that passes for horror these days. I don’t think the series ever really broke big the way it seemed like it would. I know I never read any of his other books because even my late teen self had better taste than that.

There’s a cop named Jack Eichord who is part of some kind of national task force that’s not well explained who is supposed to be a serial killer expert, and he’s come to Chicago to help find a lunatic who is cutting the hearts out of people. He meets the beautiful widow of one of the victims who was killed a few years before, and they instantly fall deeply in love. So he hangs around her and her kid. That’s about it. For being a cop, he seemingly does very little police work.

That’s because the main part of this book is about a 6’7” 450 lb. psychopath. (I think the author read Daredevil comics and based this guy on the Kingpin.) The psycho was called Chaingang when he was a one man killing machine in Vietnam because he likes to use a hunk of chain to crush the skulls of his targets when he’s feeling frisky. Not only is Chaingang completely shithouse rat crazy, he’s also brilliant. Because all serial killers in fiction are brilliant. Oh, and he also has a low level of precognition that warns him of danger.

If Miller would have stopped there he might have been on to something. The idea of an oversized deranged murderer roaming around could have been a new twist on the serial killer, but he had to keep adding things to Chaingang to the point of where a suspension of disbelief is impossible.

We’re supposed to think that a jumbo sized guy who can’t go fifteen minutes without raping and killing someone as he lugs around a giant duffel bag full of weapons and gear somehow manages to bounce around without getting noticed by the cops for years. Even with his psychic warning system that seems kind of unlikely.

And not only is Chaingang brilliant we’re told that he’s a master con man who can talk a beautiful woman into a vehicle by pretending to be a movie producer. Seriously, what woman would look at a 450 lb. stranger in a piece of shit car filled with fast foot wrappers and jump in with him?

We’re also supposed to believe that Chaingang is a master thief. Because who would notice a giant covered in blood and food stains walking around stealing shit?

So while Chaingang could have made an interesting and unique villain Miller pushed the concept way past the point of absurdity. Even for a schlock horror/crime novel there’s almost no logic to the plot. At one point, the Chicago police want to pin Chaingang’s murders on a copycat killer, and even though Eichord knows that the evidence won’t pass the simplest forensic tests he agrees to be their mouthpiece for the media to sell the story for no good reason even though he thinks the idea is stupid. Plus, the love story between Eichord and the widow is unbelievable and completely pointless except to add sex scenes to the story.

Overall, there was a halfway decent potential villain lurking in this book, but Miller spent too much time adding new unbelievable twists to his creation to come up with any plot for him or another interesting character in the whole book

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can definitely see why this has mixed reviews; the villain, 'Chaingang' Bunkowski is ridiculous, the prose experimental, and the plot rather thin. Yet, I did enjoy it, perhaps because I read it as splatstick rather than scary horror; Slob is really hard to take too seriously! Chaingang weighs in at 450+ pounds, stands ("on tree trunk legs") about 6'7", yet can move like a cat. Miller presents Chaingang as the ultimate killer, and kill he does, over and over.

Over the course of the tale, largely via numerous flashbacks, we learn Chaingang came from an extremely abusive household, but owes to that his canniness and almost 6th sense regarding danger. The army found him in prison and decided to make him part of an assassination team, dropping him in Vietnam as a killing machine, and boy did he kill! He later made it back to the States, where his killing spree continued. Our main protagonist, detective Jack Eichord, made his name tracking down serial killers, and he is part of an elite team nationwide that goes where needed; for this tale, Chicago, as some crazed killer is doing his thing and eating the hearts of his victims.

Regarding the prose, Miller sometimes lets sentences run on and on, love to highlight words IN ALL CAPITALS, and takes the narrative back and forward in time repeatedly. We spend some time in Vietnam with Chaingang, his early years, his time in prison and so forth. For Jack Eichord, the tale is more linear, with him coming to Chicago to track down the killer and inadvertently falling in love. While the story fits in nicely in the 'slasher' genre so popular in the 80s (and beyond), the prose makes it stand out; you will either like it or hate it. Miller does get repetitious at times, however; Chaingang's 'tree trunk legs', his 'cigar-like fingers', etc.

As an antagonist, Chaingang is rather unique, with his enormous appetite for both food and mayhem. Miller gives us lots glimpses of Chaingang's psyche and it is not pretty to say the least. Yet, perhaps unintentionally, Chaingang made me laugh over and over. Reading about him trashing a bathroom, pissing his 'odorous' urine in sinks and floors, belching hugely, eating 40 dollar sacks of eggrolls (with lovely sweet and sour sauce); yeah, Slob does fit as a title!

Do not pick up Slob if you are looking for a scary read, but if you are in the mood for OTT splatstick, it may scratch that itch. I have only read one other book by Miller, Chaingang, which I also liked, but I am not sure if I want to track down more of this series. You really have to be in the right mood, so YMMV. 3.5 slobs, rounding up for the sheer audacity!

[Maxine (Booklover Catlady) · Rating 1 out of 5]

When I saw this novel had accolades from Stephen King I figured it was going to be really awesome. I was wrong. Really wrong. I am not quite sure WHY the accolades from an author such as King but there we go.

Slob has the promise of being a really good read, it's about a nearly 500 lb sick, demented killer who preys on human beings to fulfil an insatiable need to hunt, harm and kill his targets.

Jack Eichord is the detective that is hunting down this monster of a killer through the streets and sewers of the city before more people lose their lives. Jack's character was one of the few positives in this book, he was a great character, we get to see his human side and his work persona and both are great, sadly the rest of the book does not make up for this.

It's a extremely wordy book. Far too much so and totally not necessary. We have chapters where we experience the streams of brain blurb flowing from our killer, his flashback memories including his time killing in Vietnam in the VC, his love of hunting down the enemy and so on and so forth. A very long-winded journey to sharing with us his need to kill.

Please enjoy a small example of the wordiness that spoils this book so much.

And then the words come. A river of noise and a flood of information of data a damn ocean of input that you are suddenly awash in, all this raw verbiage lapping at the shores of your mind, saturating your thoughts, a tidal wave of talk assails you and the actor is never off the mark with the words. First the word. The word is always right, apt, mesmerising, in character, convincing, captivating, so flattering to you, custom-designed to lull you, stimulate you, make you forget the simple reality of this frightening spectre suddenly inserting itself into your life, always reasoned, impenetrable in it's logic unwavering, so certain that you will respond like so, and perhaps a gentle physical pat from this behemoth, guiding you, nudging you, HANDLING you are the stream of words hits you and you drown in the linguistic undertow of this powerful and evil intellect.

Oh I drowned that's for sure, this book is full of long paragraphs that just meander around word after word but do nothing to impart a sense of storyline or plot. Sometimes in books being in the mind of the killer is interesting, but in this book it just went on and on, and it's mostly quite boring really.

The killer has had a horrendous childhood as most serial killers have, the book is graphic with it's kill scenes and descriptions. The killer has no mercy on his victims, he's a killing machine.

The book also switches from the first person to the third and back again many times, but it's all over the place and does not make sense, it takes you a while to adjust to which voice you are hearing again.

This has been republished as was released years ago, I think being up against some modern day crime and serial killer novels this is miles away from being that good, or that readable. I was simply drowning in a constant stream of vomited words and lack of punctuation to help you take a breath when suffering it.

It's boring reading with so many meaningless words that are there just for the sake of it, they don't add to the overall storyline one bit.

I read one paragraph which was 10 lines of constant words with one comma and one full stop for the entire thing. I think some editing and punctuation and paragraphs added to this book would help a bit.

In summary:

Overall I just did not like it and I was looking forward to reading it, but it basically an over-worded book that has a few gory scenes in it, the flashbacks to Vietnam and being inside his head with all the waffle that goes on in there just had me constantly wanting to stop reading it. I survived until the end but this is not a book I enjoyed at all. It needs more focus on the plot development and less on the use of every unusual word in the dictionary that most readers are not familiar with.

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[J Heidecker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting read. The debut novel from OG splatterpunk Rex Miller has its flaws but ultimately I enjoyed it quite a bit because of its unique narrative structure and post-modern sensibilities. Miller's prose reminded me of William S. Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon. There were a lot of run-on sentences, dream sequences infused with dream logic, acronymic jargon, time shifts, and pov character changes. I would definitely not recommend this to the 'average' horror reader, but instead to those who enjoy more experimental literature. The plot is simple; Jack Eichord is an alcoholic detective hunting down the Lonely Hearts Killer aka Daniel Bunkowski in the streets of Chicago. Both are great characters who will be further developed in Miller's Eichord series and Chaingang series. I am going to be reading all of Rex Miller's work and am currently half-way through its sequel, Slice, which I am enjoying much more than Slob, but reading Slob is necessary to appreciate its subsequent novels. Definitely a unique and singular author within the Splatterpunk subgenre of horror and I am glad that I finally took the time to read it.

[Daniel Volpe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just couldn't get into this one. The writing style is too scattered. Not as bad as Warghoul, but pretty rough. The violence was savage and the characters were well written.

[Andy Rausch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rex Miller was an amazing, truly underappreciated (or under-remembered) writer who rose to brief prominence in the paperback horror field in the 1980s and ultimately died in 2004 at the age of 65. SLOB was his first novel. At the time it was released, it was nominated by the Horror Writers of America for Best First Novel. Rex Miller was, and SLOB continues to be, a powerhouse. This book and Miller's writing are tremendous.

When you read this, your first thought is, there's no way this novel would be published today. In an era where everything is expected to be sanitized, family-friendly, and PC, there would be no place for SLOB. And that's a shame. How can one write about the darkest of the dark side of humanity without writing in such an uncompromising manner? In a lot of ways, Miller himself was, as a writer, as much of an uncultured, hulking and powerful beast as the killer he writes about. As a writer, he cruelly and sadistically demolishes everything he comes into contact with with a sort of giddy glee. And like his novel's antagonist (or is he actually the protagonist?), Bunkowski, there is more there--a sort of genius method to the madness.

Rex Miller, like Bunkowski, knows exactly what he's doing, despite the crude-looking nature of his writing. Miller's writing has a brilliant unsophistication to it. All my life I've heard in writing classes that you have to "know the rules to break the rules." I never quite understood what that meant until I read Rex Miller. Rex knows how to write and he damn well knows the rules, but then he systematically breaks almost all of them, crafting something that, at first glance, appears rudimentary but is most assuredly anything but. Rex Miller's writing is something to behold. It is the darkest, grimmest, most vile slice of life (and body parts) you are likely to read, but the tone feels exactly right for the grotesque people and scenes he's depicting. His writing makes Thomas Harris' Hannibal novels look as lame and tame as a newborn kitten in comparison. (Which reminds me: there's a scene in which animals are hurt in the book, which is big a no-no in 2021. Somehow it's okay to depict the grisly deaths of people, but not animals... And I'm not condoning cruelty to animals, but we're talking about fictitious pain inflicted by fictitious people to fictitious animals. And for the people who believe that reading and seeing such violence makes people go out and do it, no, you're wrong. If that were the case, everyone from Generation X would be a mass murderer and worse. But we're not. We're mostly just assholes. But I digress...)

Miller was a force to be reckoned with, that much is sure. Right now most of his work is out of print (perhaps for the reasons I mentioned), and that's a shame. Miller was uncompromising as a writer in just about every way imaginable, and because of that there is a purity to it. It is not watered down by societal expectations or any sort of hope or begging for approval. Author Joe R. Lansdale has many times advised that a writer should "write like everyone you know is dead," and that's exactly the way Miller writes. SLOB is everything that gritty crime and horror writing should be. It's the grittiest book you will ever read. It will give you nightmares and send you rushing to take a shower to wash away the filth.

[Graham P · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to have a memorable love-affair with this novel. But sadly, SLOB isn't slobby enough. Of course there's a 500 lb serial killer shoving 40 egg rolls down his gullet, washing it down with Tennessee's finest before murdering a model-like woman and snapping her neck with the ease of twisting a bottle cap. Shit, John Candy was scarier in Uncle Buck than this here obese killer.

The other problem is the writing. Of course I never expected the writing to be the main focus, but the dire absence of editors make this novel a neverending discourse of how fat and brilliant the killer is. And we're always in his head, an unraveling of desire and bloodlust and ALL FUCKING CAPS ANGER. I was laughing at first, but then it became tiresome. Even lines like the one below could no longer win me over:

"We're ready to think that of anybody with female plumbing, be she diesel dyke, nympho, fridge, or mud-wrestling kinkorama queen from the planet Uranus."

....or

"Eichord pondered the meaning of it all, his lonesome semen continued to solidify into cementitious mucilage in the toes of discarded socks."

I think Rex Miller perhaps abused the thesaurus of paperback poetry with this one. But still, the book cover is emblematic of the 1980s and I won't be donating it to the church book sale anytime soon.

[Ajeje Brazov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pazzesco questo romanzo, pazzesca la situazione in cui l'ho letto e pazzesca l'immagine di copertina.
tic... tac...
Partendo per ordine, il romanzo: trama classica di un thriller, c'è uno psicopatico, pluriomicida che semina morte, distruzione e sangue a volontà e poi c'è un poliziotto trasandato con un passato misterioso, che cercherà di stanare l'assassino e bla bla bla...
Fino a qui tutto discretamente bene, ma quello che mi ha sbalordito è la scrittura che l'autore ha usato per raccontarci questa storia a tratti terrificante e al limite dei conati di vomito. Ed è quella scrittura fatta di capitoli interi dove espone i deliri, sogni, riflessioni del mostro, a capitoli normali (quasi banali rispetto ai capitoli prima) dove si svolge l'investigazione, a capitoli di un'intensità emozionale eccezionale.
tic... tac...
Poi, la situazione in cui l'ho letto: allora questo romanzo lo presi molti anni fa nell'onda degli acquisti thrillerosi, dove ero entusiasmato dal genere, che poi con l'andare del tempo è scemato e questo romanzo è stato sommerso da altri libri e dalla polvere e quasi caduto nel dimenticatoio. Poi qualche giorno fa, TAC, leggiamolo, inizio ma leggo poche pagine in 2 giorni, sensazioni discordanti sul libro e lì lì per abbandonarlo, ma poi mi ci rimetto e non ho potuto più staccarmene fino alla fine.
tic... tac...
Infine, l'immagine di copertina: un gigante gommoso, gelatinoso, che si sta sciogliendo, racchiuso in un quadretto piccolino, la faccia non si vede praticamente. Chi ha letto il libro capirà subito che l'illustrazione è geniale.
tic... tac...

[Grady Hendrix · Rating 1 out of 5]

In the wake of Hannibal Lecter, writers turned their serial killers into superheroes. This is exactly what Rex Miller does with his series of books about Daniel "Chanigang" Bunkowski. It is not a wise choice. Let's take a stab at analyzing this monster.

[Tressa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wow, what a disappointment this book was. I have wanted to read this book for years because of the high praise it receives in the crime fiction/horror world, but this is really a bad book. Maybe back in 1987 when it came out it was fresh and shocking, but even time can't excuse the threadbare plot, the cardboard characters, and the bloody awful ending that happened so quickly I had to flip back a few pages to see if I missed something. Highly disappointed but at least I can shelve it as "read."

[r. fay · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most shocking thing about my experience with Slob was not how violent and disgusting the story is (though it is)--it was how moving I found the love story at the heart of the novel. 😭😭😭 It was just so thrilling and terrifying--the butterflies and nervous glances were as tense as the literal 7-foot, 500-pound psycho murderer beating down the door. Rex Miller has proven himself to me as a more than competent writer. He's creative, has an incredible vocabulary, and has a sensitivity that can take you as off guard as his proclivity for the deranged and debased. What a fascinating guy! Cant wait to keep reading!!!

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A prose version of a Creature Feature, in which the mammoth monster is a man with a taste for violence and flesh that rivals that of any bloodthirsty beast in fiction. While others seem to feel that Daniel "Chaingang" Bunkowski is glorified to heroic proportions, I just did not get that feeling at all. This is a man that is devolved by the author into something inhuman, a jazz-like mass of run-on insanity and sadistic self-aggrandizement. He is an IT. And IT is a terrifying and bile-inducing MONSTER no less so than any of King, Masterton, or Lovecraft's otherworldly horrors.

[Mikepottz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Firstly I love this cover. The author is not trying to hide anything, this book is raw and gory and moves at a fast pace. Lots of chances to get inside the killers head who is dark and disturbing. A killing machine. Overall a good read.

[Mike (Hail Horror Hail) · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a debut, this has some great writing in it, it also gets repetitive with Chaingang's 'Nam backstory. Tense at times, long-winded at others. I am looking forward to the rest of the series.

[Hex75 · Rating 3 out of 5]

"slob" è un romanzo con una buonissima idea di partenza: un serial killer che invece di essere potenzialmente anonimo è un uomo di più di duecento chili dall'odore nauseabondo, con l'inevitabile infanzia fatta di violenze e abusi ma un passato come assassino al soldo dell'esercito americano in vietnam (passato che lo zio sam cerca di nascondere), e dotato non solo di un cervello precisissimo ma anche di un intuito paranormale che lo avverte delle situazioni di pericolo.
insomma, il nemico perfetto per un horror moderno.
però rex miller esagera: è descrittivo al limite dell'insopportabile (e pure ripetitivo, a tratti), e questo finisce per annacquare la storia e -sinceramente- ad annoiare, nonostante il romanzo sia relativamente breve.
e questo è un gran problema per un horror, vecchio o moderno che sia.
ma c'è di peggio: dopo descrizioni su descrizioni (alcune decisamente pesanti, ma siamo in un romanzo di quello che veniva chiamato splatterpunk, genere non certo caratterizzato da eufemismi e giri di parole), dialoghi buttati sulla pagina quasi per aggiungere qualche pagina in più e gran personaggi buttati via si arriva allo scontro finale, in modi che si intuiscono già da qualche capitolo (regola non scritta dei polizieschi/noir/horror #123456: se il buono si innamora di una donna con prole, lei e/o la prole devono finire nelle mani del cattivo per lo scontro finale. oh, è la regola. chi si sognerebbe mai di contraddirla?), viene risolto in poche e peraltro sbrigative pagine.
come se miller si fosse rotto le palle del suo bunkowski e del suo girare sopra e sotto la città uccidendo chiunque gli capiti sotto mano e avesse deciso di chiudere il romanzo di botto, senza farsi tanti problemi di logica e di coerenza.
il libro però alla fine si lascia leggere, ma rimane la sensazione di occasione sprecata.

[Tome Reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ll start by saying this is only my opinion but…Hands-down, the worst book I’ve ever finished in my adult life! Absolutely hated Miller’s writing style. Hated everything about this book. I got 60 pages in and wanted to rage quit it, but I have DFNed 3 books this month so I wanted to stick with it. I regret that decision! I love police procedural novels. Even when they’re not that terrifying/scary. But this was just dumb! It had its moments where I was like OK now it’s gonna pick up and get good and then it would just bore me to death immediately afterward. Too damn wordy! Not scary/terrifying enough! The premise of this sounded like a homerun, so I bought all nine books in the series and now I don’t intend on reading anymore of Miller’s work! 2 stars. If anyone’s looking for books 2-9 for a cheap price, I’ll be selling them on Mercari 😂

[Ross Jeffery · Rating 4 out of 5]

Depraved, awful, disgusting, disturbing, unsettling… I loved it.

The only reason this isn’t a five star is that I felt the ending, maybe the last act really, was a little rushed, like the way it all ends seemed so odd given the lengths it had taken to get to this point, almost as if the writer had run out of steam and thought ‘yeah, that’ll do…’ I wanted a little more, it just seemed too easy at the end!

[Drew Dietsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid if unsurprising bit of two-fisted slasher nastiness. Never is quite as invigorating as its excellent cover.

[Charles Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I spied this book on the paperback rack years ago, and then looked closer to see my favorite author Stephen King endorsed it as a 'terrifying and original novel' on the cover, that was all I needed to know and I bought it. Okay, depending on the circumstances, I'm easy. But I trusted in the King, and my trust was validated when I read Rex Miller's first novel, SLOB. Like Stephen King's best-known works, this is horror that feels believably, street level real...Miller also gives us a villain unlike any ever seen before in the history of horror literature.

The villain in question is a repulsive mountain of a man who was born Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski, and the narrative explained him in part this way:

He has had extremely violent sexual fantasies for as long as he has memory. Because of his unique childhood they predate puberty. He fantasized in pitch-black, locked closets, inside a stifling metal box, chained under a filthy homemade bed, in a cell called the hole, a thousand places, on Death Row in The Max, in The Nam on a hundred night patrols, on his lonely, wonderful one-man ambushes, on foot, in cars, in countless hiding places. He has the gifts of patience and stillness, and in his long, still waiting times he fantasizes unspeakable things.

From an unspeakable childhood to night patrol in the military under the callsign CHAINGANG to federal prison and horribly, terribly free, his life formed him into a serial killer unlike any other. Even when he killed for his country, it was said he killed a man for each pound of his weight, and he was huge, breaking the scale at 500 pounds. For him, normal civilized society might as well be an alien land. He's a hunter-killer, death in stinking, repulsive flesh, as brilliant as he is insane, a murderer unlike any other who can kill in a thousand ways but favors his coil of tractor-strength safety chain. He's killing his way across Illinois, and a very human, achingly ordinary Chicago police detective named Jack Eichord is fated to stand in this nightmare's path...

Talk about books that aren't for kids! SLOB is almost relentless in its very contemporary horror about a fictional serial killer...indeed, Miller's prose is often at its most gripping when he focuses on Bunkowski and his terrible exploits. It's fascinating to be given a glimpse into a how a monster's mind works, and you'll be tempted to cringe when he commits one horrible murder after another; this novel isn't shy about bringing every ugly detail of his acts to life. That makes it all the more comforting, even a source of relief, when the focus shifts on Jack Eichord, a very human detective and former drunk just doing the best he can. Watching them on their separate paths and seeing how they come together in a brutal, kill-or-die collision course glued me to the pages...just be warned that this novel is a darker, bloodier ride than even I can say in this review!

[Benjamin Uminsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whoa... this one was pretty mind blowing. Lets start with the prose... over the top high octane! The cadence felt like a staccato blast of a heavy caliber machine gun. In terms of horror fiction, I have not previously felt an author's voice come through the prose like it did in the Slob... highly manic and forceful. As I was reading, I kinda felt like I was watching a well rehearsed practioner of Spoken Word doing his thing up on stage... I am really impressed with my first intro to Rex Miller. Honestly though, the story itself really lent itself to the prose style and I'm not sure if the high paced manic DJ approach can work ubiquitously throughout the horror genre.

As to the story... I was left gawking at the 500 lb walking nightmare of a serial killer (named Daniel Bunkowski aka Chaingang), completely terrorizing the reader for 250+ pages. At its core, this story was a noirish hunt for a serial killer with a nice exploration-of-how-evil-is-cultivated theme thrown in for contextual sub-layering. Miller's character development was probably the strongest I have read for some time. I was simply engrossed by the antagonist and wanted to keep finding out more and more. The scenes from Viet Nam were captivating and provided a really nice back story for Chaingang.

My slight criticism of this narrative is that the antagonist was so larger than life (literally and figuratively) and so well developed that he overshadowed many of the other characters, including his foil (Detective Eichord). If you are looking for a some high powered serial killer horror with strong characterization and fun action packed prose... this is the book for you. Highly recommended!!

[OutlawPoet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brutal Fiction

When I realized that Open Road Media had reissued Rex Miller's Chaingang book, I was excited. It's been many
years since I read Slob and dove right in.

It's still amazing.

Daniel "Chaingang" Bunkowski is a killer. He wasn't born a killer - he was made one. And his makers did a darned good job. He kills simply because he likes to. He's over five hundred pounds of muscle and evil and he's on a spree - just for the fun of it.

Rex Miller was one of the founding fathers of Splatterpunk and this book helped to launch a subgenre that was visceral, shocking, and utterly compelling. The book is pure violence and gore, but it's sustained by great characters an powerful storytelling.

A whole generation of authors still aspire to be king of this sub-genre. They slap gore on a page and upload it into an eBook for sale. Frankly, they need to sit down and read Rex Miller first and learn from a true Splatterpunk master.

Make no mistake - if you like your horror soft, this book is not for you. This is graphic. Chaingang likes to kill, rape, and even dine on his victims and Miller takes you through every slice, dice, and thrust.

Rex Miller may no longer be with us, but it's good to know that his very power and genre-changing fiction will live on.

Recommended only for those who can read graphic violence without flinching.

[Pianoforte · Rating 2 out of 5]

***My review contains spoilers***

Firstly the kindle edition is a poor transfer. Huge amounts of distracting typo's and an annoying hyperlink back to the main title screen at the end of each chapter.
The story itself is well written and Miller has a technique of writing a stream of conscious thoughts that works well in getting into the mind of a serial killer. The Slob himself is an interesting spin on the psycho but his excess bulk isn't exploited as well as it could have been. He is super fat but throughout the story also has mega fast speed when required, making his portrayal as a waddling lump redundant for most of the book.
My main issue with the novel is that it ends like a damp squib, over in a few pages and unsatisfying in it's resolution. Is the killer dead? It's left open for inevitable sequels. Somehow Eichord exploits Bunkowski's love of animals to get the upper hand but how he knew this beforehand isn't properly explained. As such it feels like a cheat. And we're supposed to accept he managed to obtain a box of puppies that quickly. The ending just dosn't fit in with the portrayal of the killer being super careful and almost supernatural in hi ability to detect danger. He just throws it all away in the last few paragraphs

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr. Millers first novel in his "Chaingang" series, with the 6'7", almost 500 pound Daniel Bunkowski.....the killing machine. And, the (now)sober serial killer specialist, detective Jack Eichord, picked to stop him.
Miller, who really goes into great detail/descriptions/atmosphere and the smells of the booze that once took over Jack's life. Myself, being sober for 9 1/2 years, I really feel the author had real past experience in this subject.
Back to Chaingang - he "needs" to kill, and does he ever.
Quite the debut back in the '80's...and I have the rest of the series, to see what happens between Jack & Daniel Bunkowski.

[Derek Davis · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is so bad it's almost wonderful. Apparently no one edited it, at any point, so that even the use of ital, ALL CAPS and other such intrusive shenanigans is inconsistent. The psychopath du jour is a 400-lb sadist called CHAINGANG or Chaingang, depending, who seems to hate everybody everywhere but loves puppy dogs. And he can run very fast – all 400 lbs. of him.

If you can't sleep and think a good laugh or dose of editorial horror could send you off, try it.

[Jason Hillenburg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rex Miller goes to war with this novel. Slob is unrelenting, uncompromising, and written with remarkable restraint - his forcefulness comes through in the narrative's lean economy. There are no needless incidents contained in Slob; everything is functional and serves an often horrific purpose. Miller's arrival on the scene was a boon to the horror genre during a period when the style's slush pile threatened to overwhelm any reader and it has held up very well over time.

[Alex Heigl · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a kid who'd sneak off to the horror section of the local video rental place growing up, I was riveted by the cover of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. Jason's mask was rendered in shiny chrome with a demon-snake twined through its holes, all against a solid backdrop of bright orange flames. You could see it from 20 feet away. When I finally got to watch the movie, it was, of course, terrible, and I felt betrayed by the cover for convincing me otherwise.

Reading Slob was a similiar experience. I kept seeing this book mentioned -- Harlan Ellison blurbed it-- but it was relatively rare and so I never actually got my hands on it. (Stephen King also blurbed it, but I have since realized SK will do that for virtually anything you put in front of him, which is a nice writerly gesture of solidarity but erodes some of his credibility as a reviewer.)

I have to agree with the negative reviews here. My first experience with the "splatterpunk" genre Miller loosely belongs to was Clive Barker's collected Books of Blood, which are by and large riveting. Making Rex Miller the next author I checked out after that was a huge mistake: Barker is simply on another plane compared to Miller as a conceptualist and writer. I'm not a huge gorehound but I will always stump for the best of Books of Blood because Barker is able to weld his explicit descriptions of violence to the melange of revulsion, dread, shock, and imagination that all good horror orbits around. (Looking forward to reading Kathe Koja next!)

People are correct in pointing out Miller's ticlike repetition of phrases: I don't think there's a single mention of Chaingang's fingers that doesn't compare them to cigars or more specifically "steel cigars;" his legs are routinely referred to as "tree trunks," and his rucksack is always described as something "neither you nor I could lift." The author's hyperverbosity has been discussed in other reviews, and it does give Slob some runaway-freight-train momentum that bolsters what is basically a very boilerplate "detective hunts serial killer" novel. Chaingang turns out to have a completely by-the-numbers abusive childhood, for example, and seemingly by trying to overrwrite his way out of various cliches of his own construction, Miller's torrents of copy often just wash over you and end up obscuring helpful details.

To wit: The book's pre-prologue is titled "The Precognate" -- Miller's shorthand for a mysterious semipsychic sense the titular character has -- and informs us that his mind is a "killing zone of horror where Jaws and The Exorcist meet." (Sadly this never manifests in a demonically-possessed shark.)

The book's actual prologue then introduces him as Chaingang, and within 10 pages there's entire chapter simply referring to him as Death. For the rest of the book Miller alternates between his proper name, Daniel Bunkowski, and Chaingang. Charitably, one could assume that this is an attempt to portray the fractured state of mind of a character implausibly described as both nearly mentally disabled and an off-the-charts genius, but it's not even limited to him. Other characters have both their legal names and "street names" identified, and near the book's end, closing a chapter of Chaingang's ambush of NVA soldiers in Vietnam, one of the soldiers is suddenly referred to as "the snake man" twice, having not been identified by that at any point prior.

Miller's love affair with his antagonist comes at the expense of pacing. The book's final 40 pages, include an 11-page flashback to one of Chaingang's Vietnam ambushes -- including the minutiae of how he wires different explosives and then takes them all apart and re-wires them because of a tiny detail in their setup -- and six pages resolving an utterly inconsequential subplot in which a gang of bikers attempt to bring down Chaingang, with predictably one-sided results. (The biker gang is quite funny for the ludicrous way Miller renders their dialogue: One gem of a line is "Who's fuckin' this goddamn chicken, anyway, goddamnit, you want to run this motherfucker?")

Compared to all of that, the book's final confrontation between Slob's utterly flat protagonist Jack Eichord and Chaingang is settled and done in the final eight pages, though Eichord and Chaingang only interact for three of them. For all of his genius, it turns out that Chaingang is quite easily manipulated by something mentioned exactly once> before in the book (and not in any of his flashbacks) that I'm not even sure Eichord would have had any way of knowing about. But the fact that Chaingang has a trick ankle is mentioned much more frequently, I suppose to humanize what is for all intents and purposes a superhuman being.

Some positives: There's actually more fleshing-out of Eichord's love interest (not a spoiler to say a survivor of one of Chaingang's acts) and her child and their relationship with Jack than I was expecting, though, hilariously, much of it boils down to how horny the two adults are for each other from the jump. Treading lightly with spoilers here, some of Chaingang's past is revealed to have a semi-novel shadowy-government aspect to it, which is kind of a neat twist (and certainly explains how a nearly 500-pound raving psychopath ended serving in the Armed Forces without, presumably, having gone through basic training). But aside from some phone calls Jack makes, the details are don't amount to much.

This one's probably for genre completists and no one else -- funnily enough, the same thing I'd say about Jason Goes to Hell.

[Maicie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I heard about "Slob" from one of my GR groups. The idea of a 500 pound serial-killer sounded intriguing but it failed to deliver. I liked the section on how a serial-killer is made. And the chapter with the serial-killer and the puppies was touching. But the rest was just so-so.

[Alex Budris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Classic serial killer noir from Rex Miller. This book made a little bit of a splash when it first came out. Old school splatterpunk. Jive-talk narration, rollercoaster pacing... A great read. I agree with my original assessment of the ending, though: Sudden, random, and pretty ridiculous.

[Jynx · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn't like this at all. From the flimsy storyline to the method of writing (huge, paragraph long sentences) to the sudden ending, this was a miserable read.

[Becca · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ooof. So bad. So, so bad. This is part of a nostalgic re-read I'm doing (slowly, intermittently) of some horror novels I enjoyed as a teen. I remember reading this a long time ago, but I don't recall whether I liked it or not. It's pretty typical of the 80's horror paperbacks-from-the-grocery-store genre.

This book is LOADED down with tons of unnecessary words. There are entire paragraphs that really are just one sentence, but expounded upon with every possible related adjective the author could find. It was like straight up reading a thesaurus at times. It actually drew my attention away from the story and to the writing. This book is like, 90% unnecessary words.

Additionally, there is overkill with the repetitive descriptions. We hear over and over again, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, about what an amazing genius this killer is and what an amazing detective the protagonist is. It's worse when describing Bunkowski (the killer) - even thought there is backstory to explain WHY he has these wild and crazy powers, it doesn't stop me from rolling my eyes when I have to shuffle through pages and pages AND PAGES describing his superpowers in very excruciating and exacting detail.

Romance: there's a bunch of it in here, but not in a good way. The inner monologue of the detective is 50% rambling on and on about how this woman makes him feel. Their passion feels more like an impersonal and awkward bang. But you're not here for romance. I wish the author hadn't included so much of it with reckless abandon.

Go into this with the biggest suspension of disbelief humanly possible. The physics doesn't make sense, the killer's superpowers don't make sense, and the fact that someone tripping out on acid can magically and suddenly be sober as the plot needs DEFINITELY doesn't make sense. But there you have it.

I'll give it two stars because the actual story itself, the idea of the story, isn't terrible, and because somewhere in time this review is offending teenage me. I'd say it was a fun nostalgic trip down memory lane, but in reality, it was a slog to get through. I kept putting the book down and conveniently "forgetting" to pick it back up again. And I have FOUR MORE OF THESE TO READ IN THE SERIES. Pray for me.