Malice in Blunderland by Jonny Gibbings
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’m guessing Johnny Gibbings read in a how-to-write book, or on a website someplace “try to abuse your main character as much as possible” and then he thought to himself “oh, I can do that.” And thus we have Malice in Blunderland, the story of a man riding the rails of unapologetic violence and humiliation. I’m thinking this might even be a genre of fiction. The kind of novel that would be enjoyed by those who go online to watch videos of guys wrecking on their skateboards. Part Irvine Welsh (Filth, not Trainspotting) part JG Ballard (the wince-worthy parts of Crash), a picaresque without any of that bothersome metaphor and theme.
Look, I’m not trying to slag the guy off here. Lots of people are going to love this book. Yeah, there’s clichéd characters, deux ex machina in spades, plot twists as predictable as anything you’d see in one of those 80’s mass-produced comedies… there’s typos and I’m even going to complain about how my particular e-reader didn’t like the formatting of the .mobi file I received. But Johnny can write. I swear, I’m not being facetious—plot, character, setting, who gives a damn—Gibbings’ prose style is good enough for me, good enough that if he writes another book, I’ll probably read it.
I say probably because there really where parts of Malice that made me cringe. And I think it’s fair that you, as a reader, should decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I read American Psycho, was glad I did, and swore I would never read it again. I saw Natural Born Killers, thought it was brilliant, and resolved I would never give it a second viewing. But I know there are people who reveled in the painful textures those pieces provided, and I think they’d love Malice in Blunderland.