A Punch in the Doughnut

Extract from my real-time review HERE.

A Punch in the Doughnut – David J. Schow

“It is said that the first impulse is to share good news; the second, to bludgeon someone with it.”

…and that reminds me of the quote from the Cadigan earlier: “‘Some things won’t go away and some things won’t come back.’ [...] ‘If there were any justice in the world, the two would cancel each other out, or at least balance.’” And those lies again, and whether an Oates marking on a cup is to mark that cup or to mark the other cup that has no marking. This story is so politically incorrect, I hesitate to even review it. I expect the publishers of this book will have been incarcerated since 1996 for publishing this story in the first place. But, taking my life in my hands, here goes… The prose style is a pack of synaptic racers racing inside a just-fired diamond bullet. So much more dead-eyed than a golden one. The two protagonists – I thought perhaps they are wrestlers or prize-fighters who depend on their abiding friendship as a collaborative backdrop to keeping their ‘business’ partnership-as-deadly-enemies in multilple dollars and ‘euro-market crotch grinds’ – but I’m not sure. But one of them gets a bit ’nancy-boy’ and starts yearning after a new friend with a huge dong to be lethally kissed or absorbed elsewhere. But the thing that will always stay with me about this never-to-be-forgotten story is “the Great Despair“: not a sudden shaft of revelation as we might have expected in our respective heydays of youth and aspiration but, rather, a slow-motion jumble in the jungle that accurately predicts – from when it was coined in this 1996 published story - the 2012 world today, with the downward sluggish accretive kindlefest entropy from the Millenium Bug onwards where each of us in our billions will now be needed to extract each apportioned particle of pixellated “diamond dust” that carpets the infinite retina of Cadigan’s aphasic eye: the bloodshot eye with spinning iris that is the internet. Or if not extract, implant. All depends which cup of wild justice you’ve got: marked by bluff or double bluff or neither. (12 Mar 12 – another 2 hours later)