Editor’s Note: Joseph Aisenberg, the noted author of Brian de Palma’s Carrie: Studies In the Horror Film, provides his first review for Freeline Media, taking a look back at the novel Bloody Rabbit by Michael Freeman.
ORLANDO — Mr. Freeman’s Bloody Rabbit is a wily comic nightmare.
R.T. Robeson is a well behaved gay man in his forties. Downwardly mobile, he exchanges a good paying job for a worse paying one; a nice house for an apartment whose dilapidation he tries to tell himself has retro charm. From the beginning though, the place proves to be populated by an assortment of rude oddballs who regularly presume upon Robeson’s time and temper.
Even his landlady. The old woman stops by one night after he moves in, asks for a drink and pulls a flask of her own from her purse when he turns out not to have anything on hand. She tells him a ghastly tale of previous tenants slaying a Jewish man who’d occupied Robeson’s apartment in the 1950s, and blamed it on the dead man’s Latino coworker — one of the book’s funniest scenes. But callous freaks crop up everywhere in this book.
I don’t want to spoil too much but I will talk about the book’s structure. At first it seems merely to be Robeson’s wanderings through dull daily life, but as it goes on you see the author has put the whole thing together as a set of themes and variations, which build up an uncanny charge. Every time Robeson takes the bus a man in his early 30s sits next to him and makes strange aggressive conversation. Robeson has a recurring dream about a cemetery or prison where two giggling voices string him along. Toilets and their annoying occupants keep clogging things up. People rudely accuse Robeson of having done ever more extremely rude stuff to THEM. A hunk character is rather sinister as well as presumptuous; much of his dialogue and demeanor reads like the beginning of a gay porn story or the setup for noirist goings on, and which devolves at times into absurd threats and insults, not ENTIRELY absurd. Sleaze and crime may be afoot whose implications abound and reverberate. The author’s resolutions of these themes are unexpected as well as shocking, sensationalistic, and sometimes pretty kinky.
What Works in Bloody Rabbit?
The best things in Bloody Rabbit, of course, its sharply etched portraits of Robeson’s bad neighbors make it a surreal comedy of manners. It’s how we feel about people around us on our worst days. Indeed, this menagerie of grotesques, due to the author’s focus on doubling, echoes, and uncanny mirrorings –suggests that his amusing puppets are in fact quirky projections of Robeson’s squashed nature, his unexpressed self-loathing dissociated and acted out. There’s more than one way to interpret what’s going on, though. A character who’s an expert on ghostly phenomena, one Rev. Meuller, thinks it all comes down to stinkin’ thinkin’: Robeson, he believes, is afraid of his own hostile feelings. In suppressing them, he’s caused a kind of personalized dislocation in reality, providing a set of expectations, like others in the book, which perversely misdirect the reader in ways that parody typical readings of certain Edgar Poe-like horror story conventions.
One interesting aspect of the book has to do with Robeson’s being gay. His sexuality is more or less relegated to appreciation of the sinister hunk character. Robeson has no boyfriend, indeed no gay social life at all. Islanded in a world of heterosexual weirdos, Robeson’s perspective (and the novel never leaves it) can be seen as an alienated lens through which the straight world can be seen as bizarre and disturbing, a threat oblivious to its own casual assumptions. Maybe this is why poor Robeson has to be so frustratingly, so neurotically passive.
The dialogue is often sharp, disorienting; it has a pleasingly juvenile latrine quality that helps the author past how funky everybody is and Robeson’s listless, blunted responses. To such an extent the reader finds themselves actively hoping he’ll blow up and violently flail out at all these annoying gargoyles in human costume. The character has some similarities to the stunted Josef K in Kafka’s The Trial, being buffeted by petty human obstacles which are more insectile pests than fatal forces. Some similarity as well to the protagonist of Thomas Berger’s novel Neighbors. That novel is actually closer in style to the deceptively good-natured pop Americana of Bloody Rabbit. The prose reads like a streak, utilizing cliches, worn idioms and bland colloquial phrasings which scooch the story along and flatten the strangeness of the milieu into something resembling ordinary reality. There are things which might have been improved with more atmospheric fleshing out, I think, but Freeman has such a feel for the horror of humor, and never cheats with sentimentality, so that this bright brute entertains throughout.
Who Published the book Blood Rabbit?
Published by Freeline Productions, the book is available by visiting Amazon.com, or through the Freeline online bookstore.
Joseph Aisenberg is an Oklahoma-based writer, film critic and historian. His noted works include the critical film analysis Brian De Palma’s Carrie: Studies in The Horror Film, which was nominated for The Bram Stoker Award, horror’s premier literary award. Aisenberg is also a regular contributor to film magazine Bright Lights Film Journal, has provided commentary tracks for Shout Factory’s 4K/BluRay steelbook special edition of Carrie, and is also the author of numerous other stories and novels. Freeline Media happily welcomes his contributions here.
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