Maniac Killer Strikes Again!
by Richard Sala
(Fantagraphics Books, $16.95, 176 pages, trade paperback; published
in January 2004.)
Maniac Killer Strikes Again! collects ten oddly creepy stories
by cartoonist Richard Sala. It's the literary equivalent of a grab bag
of unwholesomely delicious Halloween treats.
Sala has imagined and fashioned a world seemingly designed by Edward
Gorey and the makers of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, in which
life unfurls like a 1940s Hollywood serial written by a Franz Kafka
whose paranoia has been both indulged and validated.
These stories are populated by the ne'er-do-wells of classic B-movies
-- mad scientists, psychopathic monsters, promiscuous women, beatniks,
carnivorous plants -- and by villains whose moral deformities are mirrored
on their ugly visages, recalling the ghoulish rogues' gallery Chester
Gould created for Dick Tracy.
The setting is always unnamed: a sardonically Gothic blend of old Europe
and the naive TV version of a typical 1960s US city.
The longest story in the book is "Thirteen O'Clock" -- a complex conspiracy
thriller featuring ghastly killings, evil scientists, murderous monsters,
damsels in distress, clueless police detectives, and an ineffectual
masked vigilante called Mr. Murmur. The body count is deliriously high,
and the plot relies heavily on the most over-the-top coincidences imaginable:
this is quintessential Sala. It succeeds because it is both mordantly
ironic yet unabashedly enthusiastic about its trash-culture origins.
Several of Sala's stories -- "The Fellowship of the Creeping Cat" and
"Judy Drood, Girl Detective" being two examples -- are all the more
powerful and poignant for their uncompromisingly nihilistic endings,
combining ruthless violence with emotional despair.
Others, like "The Thirteen Fingers" and "The Keepsake", end less violently
but their quieter conclusions nevertheless ooze a similar flavour of
existential nihilism.
Sala's sense of humour is as charming as it is macabre, as obsessive
as it is iconoclastic. These comics stories deliver gruesome entertainment
delectably drenched in twentieth-century pop culture.
Originally published in
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 31 January 2004.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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