The Sodom and Gomorrah Business By Barry N. Malzberg

LSD LSD LSD LSD LSD LSD

“Death and Disorder 104

Institute courses told a grim story about the Network—that savage world beyond the closely guarded Institute gates. But they wanted to see for themselves. They had to know. 

Were there really females there? Would their training as mercenaries prepare them for the wild bands of grisly subhumans?

They set out on a journey of discovery only to become the unwitting agents of forces that threatened to destroy the only world they'd ever known.”—The back cover

“Was there a world outside? Or only dust, despair, the void?”—The front cover

Copyright 1974, this is apparently a Pocket Books first edition. 95c cover price. 126 pages. 

"Hey, we need two heads sporting euro-mullets floating over a Cadillac while having some kind of seizure." –Art Director of Pocket Books

Malzberg was really cranking them out in the mid 70s: The Sodom and Gomorrah Business was one of six (!) novels that he had published in 1974. While I expected this to be a weird one after taking in the cover and back description, I still wasn't quite prepared for this story to involve as much vicious sadism as dystopian sci-fi.

The two main characters—the unnamed narrator and his pair-bonded friend Lawson—are two students at the "Institute for Urban Control.” The pair have become bored with the lectures presented by animatronic professors and the “homosex” that is the norm for the all-male student body.  As members of "Death and Destruction 104,” the narrator and Lawson are being groomed to be Enforcers: the pride of the institute and in charge of population control (murderous sweeps) of the Network.

Narrator and Lawson decide to go on a joyride into the New York City Network—a no man’s land full of society’s unwanted who have become lawless and tribal. The narrator and his fuck buddy pop some pills, requisition a car (a two-hundred-year-old Cadillac) and some pistols, then hit the road.

They cross the decaying barriers that circumscribe the Network, making sure to insult the guards because barrier duty is beneath them. The duo then stumble upon a family of Network denizens who beg Narrator and Lawson to help them escape into the "Landscape" outside.

Unfortunately for these innocent outcasts, the two young men have more murderous intentions—first, they shoot the pleading man to death, then, as the Narrator states, he “[sets] upon her like sainted Zapruder himself, and to prove the estimate of her humanity, my worth, my dismal need, I rape the shit out of her." (p. 38) (This Zapruder guy is the newly-sainted man who videotaped the JFK assassination, which the institute has students watch time and time again.)

After the worth-affirming rape, the narrator shoots his victim, and then her child, once it begin to cry, rationalizing it as a mercy killing since the child just witnessed the rape of his mother. Oh yeah, and he ejaculates again after riddling the kid with bullets.

Soon after this fun little chapter about family values, the two Institute students are captured by a band of Network toughs from "Westerly."  The Westerly gang kills Lawson, then attempts to "deprogram" the narrator, a process consisting of some light torture along with heterosexual sex in their harem, in the hopes that they can use the narrator for their revolutionary plot.

Malzberg only allows for two female characters in the whole story—one is raped and murdered, and the other is a submissive member of the westerly harem, a broken woman who does as she is told. I don't really know what point he’s trying to make with this novel, and it only gets murkier and harder to grasp from this point on.

At first I really enjoyed the promise of the Sodom and Gomorrah Business, with its dystopian-lite setting and staccato three page chapters, but in the end the story was a light stab at social commentary drenched in the sweat and blood of sado-masochism. The result is basically a not-nearly-as-fun precursor to Escape From New York.

I can't say that I recommend the Sodom and Gomorrah Business on any level. Probably the weirdest part of this book is that it is dedicated to Malzberg's daughter, which he also did in this little gem:

No thanks!

The Vengeance Man By Dan J. Marlowe

“Nobody laughs at me and gets away with it.

Not even my cheating wife—a couple of bullets through the guts took care of her.

Not even the crooked senator.

Not even the blackmailing lesbian.

Not even the extortionist who'd taken the incriminating pictures.

But there were still some wise guys left who really believed they could kill me before I kill them. That's what damn fools are made of...” –The Back Cover

Original printing 1962, this is a 1974 reprint. 9fc cover price, 191 pages

Dan J. Marlowe’s The Vengeance Man is one hard-boiled murder story by, and a pretty sick and twisted one at that. A departure from the standard noir novel, Vengeance Man follows Jim Wilson, an out-and-out sociopath, as he ruthlessly climbs to power in the south. The book opens with Wilson shooting his adulteress wife in a motel after setting up a series of events to make it seem like a “crime of passion,” rather than the calculated murder it actually was. Soon released from jail because of juror sentiment rather than a technicality, Wilson embarks on a reign of terror that both revenges himself upon people, and, of course, benefits him financially.

Marlowe waits until after the inaugural murder to reveal that not only is Jim Wilson the sole benefactor of his late wife’s small fortune, but that he was cheating as well. In fact, all of his acts of revenge are undermined by the double standards he has for himself. Fortunately, we’re not expected to like Wilson, or any of the immoral characters throughout this book, considering they all spend the novel backstabbing and climbing over each other like obstacles. In just under 200 pages, our protagonist murders, blackmails, steals, and even rapes, in a one man orgy of hatred and greed. This doesn’t sound like a pleasant book, but Marlowe pulls it off almost perfectly.

The man could write. Oftentimes, Marlowe reminded me of Faulkner—a perverted and violent Faulkner, but Faulkner nonetheless. You get the vibe that Wilson, as the narrator, gives up trying to sugar coat his story after the first chapter. He goes on to unleash a torrent of woman-hating, absolute greed, and ferocity, all of which somehow didn’t get watered down by an editor. The end result: The Vengeance Man is a powerful book. Anti-hero in Jim Wilson is surrounded by a cast of characters just as immoral and debauched as he is, all of whom are in over their heads and are punished much worse than they deserve.

I recommend this book, but not to someone looking to get a chuckle out of a book with a shitty cover, as this is some intense reading. I know this write-up was all very vague, but almost any details would have been spoilers, this being a noir novel after all.