Craig's review - 24 April 2009
‘Garbage Man' (Bloody Books, 2009) is the second novel from UK author Joseph D'Lacey. His debut, ‘Meat', comes high on my list of recommendations for horror novels that resonate within your conscience well after you've turned the last page. This second novel has already been categorised under the blossoming ‘Eco-horror' genre, as it addresses society's over-consumption and the consequences of dumping just about anything into landfill; such a premise gave me tingles before reading.
The novel revolves around several townsfolk in Shreve, which has the country's largest landfill dump. Anyone can pay to dump whatever they want inside. Even spare body parts. That's starting to be a big problem. The earth has had enough. One of the main characters, Mason Brand, is a reclusive ex-celebrated photographer who has tried to live alone, revelling in the healing wonders of nature. He can sense that something is wrong. He is led to the dump upon hearing a familiar ‘calling', and finds one of the pits oozing a black blood. Then, in grand horror fashion, there is a terrible storm, and soon a strange creature is at Brand's rear gate. It is a foetus made of body parts and garbage. Brand knows it has come from the dump, but rather than kill it he sympathises, thinks it is part of a new generation to evolve out of man's interactions with the earth, a generation he must nurture to save us all. As the creature grows in his back shed, feeding off blood and small animals, it returns to the dump each day and forages for bigger and better parts, and when it is big enough it raises an entire army. Brand begins to think that allowing it to grow may not have been as noble as he thought, because humanity is soon threatened to extinction, used as parts for the growing garbage creatures.
Unfortunately I am a rather mixed-bag about this novel. ‘Garbage Man' is a solid horror novel, don't get me wrong, it's just that it has a lot more flaws than D'Lacey's debut. For one, D'Lacey follows a Stephen King-style approach to developing a town of quirky characters. To begin with, this is wonderful – you really get a feel for the different townsfolk and how messed up most of their lives are (you just know something's going to happen to them and constantly debate whether you'll cry or cheer when it does). D'Lacey is very good at developing characters. The flaw here, however, is that D'Lacey spends way too much time on these developments, at the risk of having minimal plot. It is not until after the first hundred pages before things start to kick in – almost one third of a book is just way too much, padding in my eyes. D'Lacey's first few chapters in ‘Meat' were also quite slow, but they had more of a poignant impact on the rest of the novel.
Whilst it is nice to build, build, and then WHAM, have the creatures rise and attack, in the first one hundred pages there are too many developments that are wasted down the track. Why have a story about a father who fights an internal demon to give up looking at child pornography, only to have his sole involvement in the plot being to dump his crushed computer in landfill and be observed by Mason Brand? Why have a woman constantly dream about the foetus she had aborted if the creature never actually reveals itself to her when it grows into the Garbage Man? And so on. Too many characters are killed off instantly too – for all the fight you are led to believe they might have, the payoff is minimal.
To me, it feels like D'Lacey has written a novella and been told to convert it into a novel. If this had been trimmed down it would have worked wonderfully, because when the garbage creatures start to rise and take over then the horror is amazing, the story tense (it reminds me of several sci-fi/horror movies). If you can get past the points made above, you will read a great novel. I'm just not sure if people should have to do that. All things aside though, D'Lacey is not the first author to write like this. If Stephen King can take over fifty frustrating pages to describe thirty seconds of a husband being shot (yes, ‘Lisey's Story') then people must be a little forgiving.
I must also note that the editing is not as refined as D'Lacey's counterpart's new novel (Bill Hussey's ‘The Absence'). Punctuation and short words are absent in places every 10-30 pages. This may be, however, because I received an early review copy, so I'm hoping these small details (because they don't ruin the story) will be remedied.
What I can beam with pride about is D'Lacey's choices as an author. He tackled a tough subject with his debut novel and now takes an even more important swing with this novel. He really is in the forefront of pushing us to think about the things blind faith would usually have us forget or dismiss. We should know where our rubbish goes, the mountains of waste we cause and the way this is effecting our earth (we have many problems in Perth with recycling trucks being caught dumping their loads in normal rubbish pits). D'Lacey reminds me why I love writing and reading horror too – you can tackle a big issue and haunt someone with it. You may spur them to make a change, or just scare the hell out of them. And the twist at the ending of this novel is superb – if you can get there, you'll be glad you did.
