Books
When reading J.F. Gonzalez’s Fetish, the first thing that came to me was this: This isn’t as good as Survivor. It didn’t bother me, because Survivor is a tough one to beat. Then I heard that Fetish was written long before Survivor and I realized why it seemed less polished than J.F.’s later material. This doesn’t mean that Fetish is not a good book. On the contrary. Fetish is an excellent novel.

There was a time when I loved serial killer novels. Then there came a time when I was sick to death of them. The way I got sick of vampire novels and the way I am getting sick of zombies. Fetish is, at least in part, a police procedural about the investigation of a particularly brutal serial killer. This novel reminds me of how fun a story like this can be.

Fetish opens with an evocative Prologue, which I nearly forgot as I read the novel. After that, we meet Detective Daryl Garcia, a hardened homicide cop with an icy vendetta against gang members. Who can blame him after the love of his life was shot down dead in a gang-related incident? Garcia abuses his authority as a peace officer, but he gets results and he is put in charge of the East Side Butcher case, in which a serial killer is beheading and dismembering gang members and affiliates of gangs. Teaming with an ambitious journalist who he begins to fall in love with, Garcia descends into the depths of the streets, desperately looking for clues in the grisly wake of destruction the killer leaves.

I took my time reading Fetish and I really enjoyed the characters and situations. It might not be the best book I read so far this year, but in a way it is the most memorable. I found myself living the case along with the investigators and empathizing with Garcia, who examines his own violent actions as he gets deeper and deeper into the mind and motives of the murderer.

I first heard of J.F. Gonzalez when he was involved in the sadly short life of a magazine called Iniquities. It was one of the coolest horror zines I ever read and it could, should have been one of the all time classics and ran for years. Who can forget that cool flexi-disc of Skipp and Spector’s No Future, from The Bridge soundtrack, that came in one of the issues of Iniquities? Gonzalez later published an old fashioned monster novel with the late Mark Williams called Clickers (Clickers 2, by J.F. and Brian Keene is coming soon) and a number of uniformly excellent short stories. One novella called Maternal Instinct blew me and just about everyone else that read it away and was expanded into the acclaimed novel, Survivor. Another novel, The Beloved, was published a year or so ago and now comes Fetish. Though old, Fetish should emphatically NOT be assumed to be some sort of inferior trunk novel. It’s a first rate, brutal, compelling combination of horror, mystery and mindfuck, all rolled into a cohesive, disturbing whole. HIGHLY recommended.





This Wildside/Cosmos publication is unsigned, but autographed copies are available at Shocklines at no additional cost.

http://store.yahoo.com/shocklines/febyjgobtrpa.html

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