The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Love Song, by Michael Schulze
reviewed by Joseph Dewey

Michael Schulze. Love Song. White Light (www.whitelightpress.com), 2003. 999 pp. $49.95.

Consider the villagers who first encounter that mutant creature conjured in the lightning-struck laboratory of Victor Frankenstein, who stand suddenly in the presence of massive, brutal novelty, a beautiful sort of beast, spliced from familiar bits but a strikingly new commodity, thunder-stepping about their village, demanding notice, terrifying and yet darkly intriguing. To read Love Song, a work twenty years in the creation, an audacious and uncompromising descent into the American fascination with violence and the contemporary pornography of horror, is to be abruptly within the terrifying/intriguing sphere of brutal novelty, something “deep, formless, and profoundly dangerous.” It plays with genres—the horror story, the play-within-a-play, the psychosexual mystery-thriller—in streams of language that test the weight-bearing capacity of the printed page. Imagine splicing Poe and Pynchon and Burroughs. What begins as a campy homage to an eccentric producer of fifties horror flicks transmutes into a mutant-story that defies summary: a crackpot behavioral scientist conducts horrific experiments in genetic splicing; a rampaging serial rapist-murderer terrorizes a quiet Midwestern town and becomes a cult hero deemed good for local businesses; an experimental garage band, fronted by a genetic mishap with a second head and an eerie gift for atonal jazz, pursues experimental performance pieces—each part of the American fascination with the darkest elements of sexuality, violence, excess, mayhem, drugs, and celebrity, summarized by the horror-film genre itself (the book moves in and out of an ongoing horror-film project; the text here ends with a massively inventive—and at times impenetrable—working script of the film). And we read, compelled like those stunned villagers by the magnitude of our repulsion and confusion (the book is not for the squeamish: Schulze details sadomasochistic sexuality and brutal killings); we become voyeurs, ultimately participants in the very horror we find so repellent. It is an unsettling, provocative reading experience.