“What a great, big pile of shit!
Let’s be clear, I fully expected a great, big pile of shit. I read it for that specific experience.
The first third or so was pretty amazing. Then…it almost felt like Johnstone submitted the first third, then got an advance, used it for cocaine, forgot about the whole thing, and the night before it was due, put it all together, shipped it off, and whoever was proofing it was like, “Fuck it, this is my last day, let’s just put the apostrophes mostly in the right places and I’m outta this hellhole!”
I’m now going to attempt to summarize the plot. Spoilers? I put a question mark because I’m not sure that I’ll be able to reassemble what I read, and because I don’t know if telling anyone what happens in this book spoils it, per se.
Jay’s aunt dies. So he goes back to Victory, MO to claim an inheritance. His aunt sucked, but I guess Jay was the closest thing she had to an heir.
Victory is apparently not a real city, BUT Missouri has a Liberty AND a Freedom. Just putting it out there.
Victory is real fucked-up. We immediately see a fat guy who is doing something fucked up to a doll that’s also sort of alive, and Johnstone tosses in that the guy is basically a child rapist. This is like page 2.
Here’s what happens in Victory: When the sun goes down, the fog rolls in, and everyone starts acting insane. A teen boy just starts jerking off on his front porch. People have sex even though they probably shouldn’t. For example, Jay, our hero, has sex with this young woman (17? 18?) who is the daughter of one of his old townie buddies. I lost track, but I think this character gets raped somewhere between 2 and 8,000 times in the course of the book.
Okay. There’s also a haunted house. Filled with living dolls. There are also dolls roaming around the woods. There are THREE kinds of living dolls in this book, near as I can figure:
1. Porcelain Mannequins
These are porcelain, human-sized dolls that can walk and talk and shit, but when they’re attacked, they shatter. Also, they’re killed with fire, which seems less efficient than the shotguns and pistols everyone is toting. If I’ve got to destroy a plate, and I can use a gun or fire? C’mon. These dolls are all bad guys and kill people, mostly while their arms are detached from their bodies. These people seem to be sometimes people who used to be real humans, sometimes not, and how they become this way isn’t explained.
2. Little Evil Dolls
All kinds of dolls, evil, stabbing people with needles and tiny swords. These are apparently the new bodies of people who lived in Liberty. This process isn’t really explained.
3. Little Not Evil Dolls
These seem to be identical to the Little Evil Dolls, except they’re not evil and they want to fight the evil dolls. I’m not entirely sure what the difference is between them and the evil dolls, what makes them not evil, or how the characters would know which dolls are evil and which aren’t other than the not evil dolls being gruesomely mutilated by the evil dolls now and then. They also fly planes and drop firecrackers on the bad guys.
Okay, so Jay comes to town. Evil shit starts happening, especially around roaming packs of teens. Which, how can you tell the difference!? (dad joke)
A blind priest, his former surgeon/thug assistant, a retired general, a news team, a cop (who is named Jim, which was REALLY confusing because we’ve got a Jim and a Jay, and these characters are not exactly well-rendered and I lost track of the differences), an archery expert doctor, and some other randos fight against the evil in Victory. They can’t seem to get police help from outside the city because…reasons. They can’t leave the town because…reasons.
Jay almost has sex with his daughter while they’re both in the fog, but then their cross necklaces click together, yanking Jay out of his fogged-in stupor. But then, the next morning, it turns out Jay’s lady friend and her daughter had sex at their house. Which…I guess part of the problem here is that there’s a SHITLOAD of incest going down in Victory, which results in weird monsters somehow, but that doesn’t really explain a mother/daughter evil fog tryst.
There’s a part where Jay gets captured and put in a hospital. Where he sort of puts together there’s an ancient evil of some kind that does…something. Somehow. It’s involved in making the dolls (maybe all three types) in addition to some mutants, plus spreading the evil around. He escapes via clever ruse (and also punching a guy super hard in the balls), and then gets back to running around with his cronies, shooting stuff, burning stuff, and then sometimes being easily cowed by a group of teens.
Can we talk about lost subplots?
TOY FACTORY: There’s a toymaker shipping toys all over the world. Which I think was supposed to serve as a last-minute, pre-credits sort of wink that things aren’t really over, but it doesn’t go anywhere.
CHILD PORN: Apparently the evil one is making child pornography, which is a financial endeavor(?) This is very unclear, although I guess it’s here because it’s one of the evil-est things you can do? It doesn’t really play into the plot so much.
THE AUNT: I don’t know. She’s like a ghost? They burn her house down? A bunch of dolls live there, but some are evil and some aren’t? Super confusing.
THE NEWS: A news team shows up at some point to sort of help with things and show the world what’s going on. Doesn’t really go anywhere.
THE DOLLMAKER: I could be wrong, I read this kind of fast, but I don’t know if the evil, fat dollmaker ever gets his, escapes, or what. He seemed like the sub-villain, the one we’re supposed to think is the villain, but then he isn’t. But…I think he just kind of vanishes from the book.
SATANISTS: These guys meet in a church and talk cryptically about “the dark one” or “the evil one” or whatever. They turn the cross upside-down while they meet. I’m not really sure why they’re meeting in secret (having an orgy at one point) when everyone in the entire city is part of the craziness. Why the cloak and dagger shit? EVERYONE YOU KNOW is in on it.
TIME: Jay figures out that something is happening regarding time. And that by disrupting this, he can accomplish something. So he blasts a clock to pieces, which solves the problem, whatever it is, briefly catapults our characters back in time to the 20’s or so, then that just sort of resolves itself and the time distortion is over. Although everything seems exactly the same following the resolution of this problem.
TEENS: There is a group of evil teens. Which it turns out, Jay’s daughter is one of them. He tries to kill her a couple times, which you would think would be kind of a big deal, but it’s not.
There’s a bunch of mayhem (which is the best shit) and then a twist when it turns out some of the good guys are actually bad guys, and the whole anticlimax ends with Jay stabbing an old man at the dump, which apparently ends the curse.
I have, I think, three criteria for enjoying shitty shit:
1. I have to be able to follow it, generally. It doesn’t have to be an amazing plot, but I like to know what’s going on from moment to moment.
2. It can’t be intentionally shitty. Sharknado is my prime example. When someone makes something shitty on purpose, feh.
3. It’s got to have some real crazy nonsense that takes things too far in one aspect or another.
This one has two of three. It’s got some real crazy, and I think it’s sincere. But it was just so damn hard to follow, and it was like Johnstone had a chance to write one book, so he threw in EVERYTHING. Which is insane as he wrote 25 horror novels in like 10 years.
I’m torn on it. If you, like me, sometimes enjoy getting loaded and reading at a bar, this is perfect. If you, like me, also kind of hate working really hard to follow something you shouldn’t give a wet fart about, this is very much imperfect.
Mixed bag? Yeah. Hopefully I won’t be thinking of the time I spent reading this when I’m looking back on my life. “