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MARILYN THE WILD by Jerome Charyn

MARILYN THE WILD

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Pub Date: March 1st, 1976
Publisher: Arbor House

In this self-contained sequel to Charyn's Blue Eyes everybody wears a black hat. Rupert Weil, a fifteen-year-old psychotic, stalks New York City in savage pursuit of Isaac the Pure, a supercop who takes nothing off nobody. Rupert's motives are thin at best, so they must be accepted on faith--a faith in madness. The Grand Guignol supporting cast indulges itself in a dazzling variety of physical mayhem, brutalizing sex and oral abuse. The shock value of these activities palls, since this is all anyone ever does in spite of an overlay of sentimentality which rings false. The threads come together in the end, but it's too late: the reader is glutted. The author is at his best--and very good it is--in conveying the intrusive palpability of the city (e.g., there is a marvelously horrific blizzard). But finally, Charyn's disgust with and loathing of his cripples does him in. If his message is that Fun City is, in fact, Kill City, then he's probably been too successful.