HIGH LIFE

A drab, sour novel about a lowlife's greedy grab for the high life.

For two joyless years, Jackie, a ne'er do well soon to become a necrophiliac, has been married to Karen, a hooker soon to become a disemboweled corpse. One night by happenstance he finds her naked and dead in a park in Venice, California: “Her eyes were closed, but her belly was open—sliced from sternum through navel . . . . ” Among other things, she's short a kidney. To Jackie, however, this is prior knowledge, since he's aware that she recently parted with that particular organ for $30,000, most of it spent on a car for him and drugs for her. Jackie, being Jackie, doesn't bother to inform the police of his relationship to the murdered woman. A few nights later, the LAPD’s loathsome Detective Ryan pays him a visit and makes it clear that, for a variety of reasons, he considers Jackie eminently blackmailable. Meanwhile, Jackie has quit his job at Donut Haven and, needing money, gone on the game. It’s while plying his trade that he meets bad, beautiful, very rich Bella, who takes a fancy to him. Bella’s a doctor—though not a surgeon—who gets off on sex with people she's slicing up. Around this time, Jackie discovers that he gets off on sex with corpses. In a rare contemplative mood, he puts together Bella’s slice-and-dice perversion and Karen’s kidney loss and concludes that he might be the toy boy of his wife's murderer. Not that he cares much. “The girl was dead,” Jackie says characteristically, “but she would have died whether I was there or not . . . what real difference did it make to me?”

If this meretricious mess isn't actual pornography, it’s hiding out—to borrow a phrase from the author (Cows, 1997, not reviewed)—in “porn territory.”