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I'm an obsessively punctual person by nature. Being on time - or better yet, being early - is like having a superpower of life design, as long as you're not lazy. People often ask me how I can manage to read so many books: try arriving fifteen minutes early to every meeting you have for a week and see the effect on your reading numbers. That said, I don't know where the fuck I was when the invites for Lance Carbuncle's literary party were handed out, but boy, am I late to this baby or what? I only recently had the pleasure of sitting through the audiobook of his novel Sloughing Off the Rot and I got high off the literary and philosophical fumes of this rip roaring bad boy.
John the Revelator has no memory of his life before waking up in a chaotic netherworld, but according to his guide Santiago, he was a whiny bitch and someone other people tried to avoid in general. That is why he is sent along El Camino de la Muerte, looking for answers that'll help him become not only a better person, but another person altogether. There will be many dangers, deaths and rebirths along the way. At the heart of chaos, patterns emerge and new paths are forged out of nothingness. John doesn't know whether he was chosen or he angered a dark God, but he's giving this quest an earnest shot.
Sloughing Off the Rot is bizarre, grotesque, crass and utterly iconoclast, but it is overflowing with killer literary references. The first that comes to mind is Dante's Inferno, the first volume of The Divine Comedy. Instead of going through hell to save the love of his life though, John the Revelator really is saving himself from a rudderless, meaningless life. The other major reference is Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Sloughing Off the Rot is part Western, part a painting of hell and violence is the tool of John the Revelator's transformation. For such a wild and imaginative novel, it has a strong psychological understanding of change and suspended reality.
The organic horrors of Sloughing Off the Rot aren't just free calories. The imagery sure is grotesque and terrifying, but there is always a logical construction behind any ordeal Lance Carbuncle puts his protagonist through. The constant onslaught of horrors can become overbearing though as it's getting worse and worse the further you're reading along. The constantly increasing "grotesquerie" really was the only issue I had with the novel as it took some of the focus off John the Revelator, which I thought deserved all the spotlight he could get. Sloughing Off the Rot is an odyssey of change more than it is an horror novel, despite what it might be thinking about itself.
So, should you read Sloughing Off the Rot? Absolutely, but you need a certain stomach for Lance Carbuncle's overflowing, bizarre imagery. Some of you will get weirded out and will put the book down before page 10 and that's cool. Sloughing Off the Rot is not meant for everyone. It has a strong literary pedigree that will remind readers of Dante, McCarthy, Michaux, Artaud and several other damned poets, but it is very much a Lance Carbuncle novel, shrouded in chaos, violence and grotesque imagery. That is why Sloughing Off the Rot is bound to remain a hidden treasure in contemporary culture.