I promised a review of Blood For You: A Literary Tribute to GG Allin in my last blog post. Well, here it is. Short version: I like the man and his music better than I do this fictional anthology about him and his many guises.
The short stories are much like GG was back when he still stormed the Earth. They are raw, violent, shocking, outrageous, and sometimes incomprehensible. As I mentioned in that last post, since this is an anthology you are going to have some stories you like and some that fail. Well, I liked a few, hated a few others, and did not love any of them. Whether GG was a floating baby, an operative for President Bush, fighting a werewolf as the "ultimate shock," or hosting a nightclub inside his expanding penis, the stories all showed imagination, but they also required a knowledge of GG and his life. I imagine the editors of this book thought that nobody but die-hard GG Allin fans would buy this, and they were probably right, but readers needed to fill in a lot of gaps on their own, and that kind of ruined some stories.
I know how Merle, the Murder Junkies, the Jabbers, and John Wayne Gacy fit into GG's world. I know it quite well, actually. But the writers got lazy with all that. They introduced characters just to introduce them. They fit in song lyrics just to show they knew them. This casual handling makes many of the stories feel more like bad fan fiction than it does a literary tribute, and that is ultimately disappointing.
I was not expecting this to be a future classic. I was hoping it would be more than a shoulder shrug of a book, however. The truth of it is, if the average reader who does not know about GG Allin was to read this, they would still have no real idea. You could replace GG's name with any other name, and the book would read the same and mean the same. That is bad fiction. That is cookie cutter writing.
With all that criticism, I am still glad this exists. If it can get someone to look into GG's life and music, then it has done its job. I'm afraid, however, the opposite would happen here. If someone just stumbled into this, they would not be willing to take that plunge into mayhem. In fact, they may not even think GG was a real person. I would not blame them for that. How to fix all this? Maybe a second volume that has a bit of a higher standard for its stories? I'm not sure, but I do know I would not be excited to read it . . . though I would probably still give it a go out of curiosity alone. GG deserves better.
If you click on a link, I may get some scratch in order to buy my weight in coke in whores because I'm an affiliate, man!
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