A couple years ago I came across this little guy, beaten and ragged, at an old book shoppe; the cult-ish '70s Grove Press logo initially drew my interest, as their publishing during the height of the counter culture often proved to be, if not genuinely good, at least interesting and worthwhile. With its cover both sexy and tacky (in that '70s-porn kind of way), and the inside adorned with praise from the likes of Holmes and Vonnegut comparing Schneck's writing to Burroughs', it seemed like it'd be right up my alley, a lost gem from the romantic 1960s to sit alongside other lost classics like Nog.

Of course you see my 2-star rating. You know already my expectations proved wrong, to the point that I can't even say the Nightclerk was interesting enough to make it worth reading. It's a mess of shallow ideas and gimmicky writing (i.e., think physical shape House of Leaves' text takes--but bad, pointless), two stories--two styles--back to back, related only in Blight's fat role. Up to page 100 it reads like a prose copy of Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, the narrator nothing more than a camera setting up the scene by swooping down the long corridors of a San Francisco hotel, centering again and again in the lobby where Blight sat, his shifting bulk of 600+ lbs. reading penny dreadfuls and cutting out magazine photos, thinking of Crowleyan magick (for some reason(?)) as he takes payment from prostitutes and their customers; where--in an image I actually quite liked and warranted most of the 2-star positives--shadows creep up from the corners on his rotten fantasies. 100 pages of establishing the setting repeatedly, and then we're introduced to the front-cover sex kitten Katy, and it's this point that the book denegrates into nothing more than cliched pornographic fantasies and rascally attempts at slapstick.

The first half, reminiscent as it is of Resnais and Robbe-Grillet's stunningly original film, is interesting enough, but any lasting impact that could have is ruined by the dated anti-porn satire (remember that this was written in the '60s...) that takes over the last hundred pages.

If you ask me, it's out of print for good reason. Or maybe...maybe I just didn't get it...?

[24] ( )

memorable

It's an odd book: the theme is erotic fantasies, but the stories are nothing you can get horny from. A lot of sad squalor in the package of melancholic poetry, a lot of allusions to magic (written “Magick”), a deliberate mixing of fantasy and reality, and it all reads like it's a deliberate parody of someone's writing style. The sequences of words are quite musical and I liked it a lot and I'm not sure I should have, as the only redeeming part of the whole book is the style; unless you're supposed to "see through it all." Wish somebody else would review it.