Book Review: The Shaft

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Book Review: 'The Shaft' by David J. Schow

2 / 5 Stars

Nowadays Splatterpunk is mainstreamed as a horror genre, so much so that if I go to amazon.com and do a book Search for the noun, I get deluged with an entire library of small-press, self-published, Print On Demand trade paperbacks and Kindle titles. 

I'm sure the majority of such titles receive little (if any) editorial oversight beyond asking submitters to do a Spell Check, and maybe Grammarly, on their Word files. So I'm not especially motivated to obtain, and read, very many of them. 

But I am willing to take a trip back to when splatterpunk was just emerging as a genre, and one of its foremost practitioners was mining new territory in the era of the 'Paperbacks from Hell'.

David J. Schow (pronounced 'Skow') was born in Marburg, Germany in 1955 to an American military family (his father was a gunner on a B-24 Liberator bomber in World War Two). The family moved to the U.S. when Schow was of kindergarten age and eventually settled in Huntington Beach, California. Schow grew up in rather strained circumstances, but realized at an early age he loved monster magazines, the Outer Limits TV show, and the idea of writing stories.

Schow went on to coin the term 'splatterpunk', and unlike other writers associated with the term (such as Joe R. Lansdale) he never has shied from standing forth as a representative of the genre. He made his first short story sale at age 23, to Odyssey science fiction magazine, and later published his second short story in the Twilight Zone Magazine in 1982. Schow advanced to publishing novels, screenplays, and nonfiction books, emerging as one of the more successful horror writers of the 1990s and beyond.

'The Shaft' originally appeared as a short story in the Spring of 1990, in a special 'David J. Schow' issue of yet another revival of Weird Tales. The story also is available in the anthology 'DJStories' (Subterranean Press, 2018).

Later in 1990, Schow expanded the story into a novel, which was published in the UK in both hardcover and paperback editions.

Both the original printings of 'The Shaft' are long out of print and command very steep prices. Fortunately, this trade paperback edition of 'The Shaft' was issued by Macabre Ink Press / Crossroad Press in April, 2020. According to Schow, the trade paperback (372 pp.) contains additional content as compared to the 1990 version.

'The Shaft' is set in wintertime Chicago in the late 1980s. Three young people, all 'damaged' in some way, find themselves taking residence in the deteriorating tenement known as the Kenilworth Arms:

Jonathan is a graphic designer who, after breaking up with his girlfriend, decides to leave Texas for Chicago and a new start in life. Consumed with self-pity, Jonathan is a cuck who finds the northern snow, sleet, and freezing temperatures as just one more injustice visited upon his hapless shoulders.

Jamaica is a streetwise and sexy call girl whose clientele are not very nice people. But they are well-equipped with drugs, and liberal with their cash. An encounter with a resident at the Kenilworth Arms sets in motion a chain of events that will have unpleasant consequences for some of the debased Chicago residents that make up her social circle.

Cruz is a young up-and-comer in the Miami drug trade, but when something goes really wrong, he has to flee to Chicago and wait for tensions to subside. Unfortunately for Cruz, his place of residence in the WIndy City turns out to be the Kenilworth Arms.............

What Jonathan, Jamaica, and Cruz don't know is that Something Evil is lurking inside the slime-covered ventilation shaft inserted into the structure of the Kenilworth Arms. As a blizzard strikes Chicago, our trio will find themselves threatened by this malevolence.....and they have no one to rely on, save themselves........

'The Shaft' declares its commitment to splatterpunk in its very first chapter, which is simultaneously gross, and laugh-out-loud funny. Needless to say, it likely would have repelled and disgusted Charles L. Grant.

But the first chapter also signals that 'The Shaft' is not an easy read. Schow’s diction is an overload of dense prose and resolutely hard-boiled language. Here’s a description of the manager of the Kenilworth Arms:

His first shock had been Fergus, the “manager”, whose job description would read “pusbag” on some document if there was any justice in the cosmos. He lived in clothes that looked scrounged off dead winos and smelled as if he drank a pint of Aqua Velva a day…perhaps to pickle his flesh, which was doughy and spotted like overripe fruit. His ratty Converse All-Stars were slick and grimy; they had been white at the beginning of time. Maybe. Things had been hatched inside them, Cruz thought, and Fergus had slipped them onto his plump, horny feet while the membranes and afterbirth were still warm. Gnomish and dull of gaze, he exuded the aromas of stale dates and sour breath from beneath his megadose of aftershave. There were brown gaps between each of his teeth, and even in this freezing climate the tips of his hacked-off and slicked-back hair were perpetually gravid with droplets of some opaque liquid. Cruz would learn that the guy only understood English clearly around the first of the rental month. He had informed Cruz – in English – that rent would be acceptable only in the form of cash or money orders, the ukase new and the fault of newer tenants, who were unbelievable in such responsibilities. 

The plot of 'The Shaft' is rather thin, and struggles to bear the weight of too much exposition. I finished the book thinking that it would have benefitted from curtailing the descriptive prose sufficiently to reduce its length to under 250 pages. 

The verdict ? Die-hard Schow fans and aficionados of Splat will want to have 'The Shaft' in their collection, but in my opinion, the original short story, by virtue of its condensed nature, makes it a better read than the novel.