The Serialist, by David Gordon (Simon And Schuster)
David Gordon's debut novel, The Serialist, which recently won the VCU Cabell First novelist Award, is as stunning as it is mesmerizing. Combining elements of dark satire, pulp novels, and porno, Gordon slits New York's throat with a hilarious and wholly original tale. Set in the grimy underbelly of New York's avante-garde B-lit scene, The Serialist centers around Harry Bloch, a pessimistic and cunning pulp-writer. After watching his ex-wife's rise to success with her all-too-chic literary journal, The Torn Plaid Coat, Bloch decides to take the chance of a lifetime, writing famed serial killer Darian Clay's autobiography. The writer--soon turned detective--stumbles into much more than he bargained for, however, when fresh bodies modeling Clay's murders start turning up much too close to Bloch himself. With the assistance of a teen schoolgirl and a stripper, Bloch becomes the protagonist in his own detective tale.
Gordon reinvents the detective novel, nodding to Dashiell Hammett and George Higgins as he slinks into the gory and sexy world of Harry Bloch. Gordon stops only to stun the reader again and again with his clean prose, practiced and effortless reflection on his own craft, and its place in a world where print is a dying breed. A book for readers, The Serialist is chock full of genre humor and references that only fetishists will understand, as Bloch is all too ready to admit. “With all the piercings and black clothes and stockings and such, my slut skills fit right in and I found I was able to squeeze out a living, while literature languished, writing pulps for the nerdy and the perverse: when books become a fetish, only fetishists will still read books.”
Gordon's story about storytelling, the beauty of craft, and the love of perfection's nuances gives the reader insight into the artistic eye. Gordon captures perfectly the emotional turmoil of languishing over every detail of craft. The juxtaposition of methodological serial killer and practiced writer is as genius as it is perverse. The Serialist never misses a beat, never loses the reader, and hardly allows itself to be put down.