The Drive-Thru Crematorium: A Detour into the Bizarre

I interrupt the order of these reviews to discuss Jon Bassoff’s The Drive-Thru Crematorium (Eraserhead Press, 2019) in rough proximity to its publication date (August 2019). I had the good fortune to engage in an email interview with Bassoff, which I’ve incorporated into this analysis. This is Bassoff’s sixth novel; his earlier books, all published by Down & Out press, are “gothic noir” adventures that have received considerable praise. In what follows, I use a close reading of The Drive-Thru Crematorium to introduce readers to bizarro fiction, the latest genre to emerge from the weird renaissance. Bassoff’s novella, a free-wheeling mashup of plot twists one finds in Jim Thompson (e.g., The Nothing Man or Pop. 1280) and Franz Kafka (elements of The Trial and The Metamorphosis), exemplifies some of the qualities that define this genre. Along with Michael Cisco’s Unlanguage (also published by Eraserhead), which will be discussed later in this series, The Drive-Thru Crematorium helps to determine the kinds and degrees of weirdness coming out of Portland’s strangest press.

Bizarro Fiction

Given its publication by Eraserhead Press, The Drive-Thru Crematorium appears to be a work of bizarro fiction. This emerging genre is published by several small presses, including Bizarro Books, Raw Dog Screaming Press, and Afterbirth Books, but Eraserhead is the most prominent and prolific publisher of bizarro fiction today. As the name suggests, this is unquestionably weird stuff. Bizarre and weird are nearly interchangeable in commonsense discourse. Bassoff has published numerous other books that have been categorized as gothic, noir, and suspense, so he should not be regarded as exclusively or even primarily as a “bizarro” writer. When I asked Bassoff if he regarded his novel as Bizarro, he wrote (in part): “I’m not entirely sure where/if I fit into the genre. I certainly didn’t write The Drive-Thru Crematorium—or any of my other novels—with the bizarro genre in mind, but once I finished, I knew I had written a novel that was weird as hell. I knew this wasn’t going to be gobbled up by many mainstream publishers. But when I found out that Eraserhead gravitated to influences such as Kafka and Lynch, I thought that maybe we could be a fit.”  Bassoff’s narrative and allusions indicate a sensibility that helps to explain the genre. Bizarro fiction is “weird as hell.” It’s about as far outside the “mainstream” as you can get this side of pornography (which it often includes, albeit not in this narrative). It gravitates toward absurdism and pop-culture postmodernism—Kafka and Lynch are its saints.

The Bizarro Starter Kit, an anthology published in 2007 by Bizarro Books, presents an explanation of the genre that sounds more like a shopping list than a manifesto. The first definition explains why no study of contemporary weird fiction should neglect it: “Bizarro, simply put, is the genre of the weird.” The second definition, quoted more frequently, claims that “Bizarro is the literary equivalent to the cult section at the video store.” Ah the 1980s—I remember them fondly when I recall “the cult section” at the local video store, although I would have difficulty explaining exactly what could be found there. Although “cult” suggests conformity, it was really the most eclectic aisle, one that contained a myriad of partial objects: low-budget horror, experimental films, strange documentaries, “outsider” movies. In the early days of video stores, this section, not “mainstream” (drama, comedy, action, foreign) and not pornography (behind the curtain), was an amalgam of grade-B and independent films that had made it up the supply chains to become the short-lived objects that video tapes were. David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) is a good example; independently produced, combining surrealism with body horror, slowly gaining in status thanks to a small audience of die-hard fans: the film clearly inspires many elements of the Bizarro genre. An equally good example would be John Waters’ Pink Flamingos (1972). Or Paul Morrissey’s Flesh (1968). Or the Mondo horror compilation Faces of Death (1978). Whichever titles one chooses to exemplify this short-lived category of video rental browsing, the general sense of “edgy” eclecticism is key: this is pop culture’s back-alley, where pushers, punks, prostitutes, pansies, and the poor congregate in the shadows, seeking relief from the punishing glare of Main Street conformity.

The peculiar mixture of art and/as filth, the timeless and trashy, is made explicit by another definition in The Bizarro Starter Kit: “Franz Kafka meets Joe Bob Briggs.” Kafka was a Jewish Bohemian modernist whose absurdist stories stand alongside those of Joyce, Nabokov, Stein, and Woolf in the canons of modernist fiction. Briggs is a contemporary, self-proclaimed “red neck” internet sensation, whose reviews of shitty “Southern” movies (all of which resemble the Dukes of Hazard TV show, according to his own criteria) revel in their low-brow status. This contrast between modernist, international, avant-garde aesthetics and postmodernist, nationalistic, popular pleasures drives important aspects of the genre. It hinges upon an opposition much like Durkheim’s distinction between a “sacred” singular (embodied by Kafka or Lynch) and the “profane” multitude (encompassed by a proliferation of grade-B, trashy, and “generic” sensations). Bizarro fiction’s “weirdness” results from genre’s effort to desacralize normative aesthetics. As I’ve suggested in earlier posts, this affective quality of the weird (i.e., as that which is non-normative) is more important than the appearance of supernatural entities, the presence of “cosmic horror,” or any particular plot or narrative.  

The “pulp” qualities of Bizarro fiction are evident in the mode of publication, as exemplified by Eraserhead. A glance at the https://eraserheadpress.com/ reveals an incredibly rapid rate of publication. They appear to be publishing at least one paperback every month. Since The Drive-Thru Crematorium appeared in August, this small press has released Renee S. DeCamillis’ The Bone Cutters (September, 2019), Dave Zeltserman’s Everybody Lives in Hell (October 2019), S. T. Cartledge’s Cherry Blossom Eyes (November, 2019), and Kevin Sweeney’s Genocide on the Infinite Express (December 2019). Another notable feature is the publication rate of some authors, most notably Carlton Mellick III, whose novellas have been appearing at a steady clip since the genre began. His best-known titles include The Baby Jesus Butt Plug (2004), The Haunted Vagina (2006), and Every Time We Meet at the Dairy Queen, Your Whole Fucking Face Explodes (2016). His recent Eraserhead publications include Mouse Trap (2019), The Boy with the Chainsaw Heart (2018), Neverday (2018), and Stacking Doll (2018). In its cultivation of prolific authors and rush to get titles that fulfill generic expectations to market, Eraserhead resembles pulp publishers during the “golden age”: a resemblance worn with pride on the flashy covers of some publications, which allude to the gaudy covers of Weird Tales, Dime Detective, or Adventure Stories, as well as the famous Franzetta covers of fantasy paperbacks. Whereas the pulps and paperbacks marshalled the labor markets of industrial modernism to distribute thousands of weekly and monthly magazines to consumers through subscriptions, newsstands, and the check-out lines at grocery stories, Eraserhead appears to be organized through post-industrial channels. Titles are made available through Amazon and are probably printed on demand. Amazon’s incomprehensibly large marketplace allows a press like this to find its audience without the burden of shipping or even necessarily printing copies prior to sale. Although the labor and distribution networks are entirely different, the effort to stand out in a mass-market of rapidly produced cultural products makes Bizarro fiction a kind of pulp redux: a knowing and often ironic return to the stuff that was so bad it was good.

The Drive-Thru Crematorium

Bassoff’s novella begins, “Stanley Maddox had worked at Evergreen Lending for six years before they forgot who he was” (7). This absurdist premise is presented with blunt efficiency in the first chapter. One day, arriving at the office, his coworkers regard him with confusion. Mr. Elliot, the boss, wonders if Stanley is a new employee. He explains that there is no record or recollection of Stanley at the firm. Our protagonist accepts this in a peculiarly detached manner: “’I see,’ Stanley said. He was surprised and saddened by Mr. Elliot’s research but had to admit that the evidence was overwhelming . . . Unless there was a conspiracy of forgetfulness, it seemed likely that it was he who was mistaken” (10). Finding that Stanley seems qualified to do the job he’s held for six years, Mr. Elliot makes an absurd offer: Stanley may continue to work for Evergreen Lending, provided he doesn’t require a salary. Confused, saddened, and exhausted, Stanley accepts the newly impossible conditions.

In what I’ll call a “classic” work of weird fiction—a story by Hoffmann or Gaskell, Wells, or Jackson or Kafka—this event and its consequences would constitute the entirety of the story. The erasure of the protagonist from his workplace would unfold gradually, building the “hesitation,” or suspension of the sense of reality, that Todorov describes. Or we would be presented with an account of daily life that was slowly or suddenly turned inside out by the loss of recognition, with a focus on the narrator’s potential delusions. But it’s precisely that quaint practice of 18^th/19^th/20^th century realism that bizarro fiction has no time for. It wants an aesthetic where Kafka and Joe Bob Briggs really do intersect. One potential result of this juxtaposition is a recognition of the absurdity of consumer culture; but it also defuses the “Kafkaesque” qualities of the text by introducing them into a temporality that can’t sustain realism (which takes both the writer’s time, in the search for the “mot juste,” and the reader’s time, in the imaginary absorption into a fictional reality).

The Drive-Thru Crematorium provides a good example of this contemporary pacing. By the end of the first chapter, Stanley is reconciled to his fate. The impossible thing does not have a profound psychological or even, apparently, material effect upon his life. There are reasons for the character’s lack of affect, which I will discuss later. For the moment, let’s stick to the plot. In rapid succession, it delivers a half-dozen or so equally bizarre events—any one of which would constitute an entire story by most writers of weird fiction. Stanley arrives home. His wife Wendy is on the couch, engrossed in a made-for-TV movie. She ignores him. In the upstairs bedroom, changing out of his work clothes, Stanley sees “a man in the house opposite, his face pressed against the dimly-lit window. He was banging on the glass and seemed to be yelling” (15). The panicked man in the suburban house next door is more than enough for a tale of suspense or strangeness. But Stanley does nothing, and the man goes away. At the dinner table, Wendy tells him that “there’s a rabbit in the house” (17). After dinner, Stanley goes looking for the apparently wounded animal, following a trail of bloody paw prints into the basement, where he discovers “something equally strange. In the middle of the room were piles of pinewood boards, surrounded by a handsaw, tape measure, hammer, and framing square. And behind the wood and tools were three caskets, one sized for an infant” (19). This, of course, is shockingly unexpected and would encompass the totality of a more traditional weird narrative. Stanley tells Wendy about the coffins in the basement, but she merely shrugs it off, and he’s somehow too timid or respectful of her silence to pursue the matter. Instead, lays awake, worrying about “the Midnight Monster,” a home-invading psycho-killer that’s in the news. He observes a picture of himself and his wife on the bedroom wall. Looking more closely, he sees that “the cropping of the photo was different. Both he and his wife had shifted ever-so-slightly to the left, and now a portion of Stanley’s leg and shoulder was gone from the frame” (21-2). This is another marvelous subject for a weird tale in its own right—is this a supernatural event, as in M. R. James’ “The Mezzotint,” or is Wendy gaslighting him in some way? But Stanley merely reflects that “the world was a strange place” and goes to sleep (22). The next morning, he looks at himself in the bathroom mirror. He observes “a small flap of skin, the size of a canine tooth,” hanging “below his cheekbone”—a mysterious wound. He wonders, “What if the skin continued peeling, bit by bit, until his entire face was gone, leaving a monstrous one beneath?” (23). Spoiler alert: this will happen before the short novella has run its course. As I’ve suggested, any one of these scenarios might be the basis for a weird narrative, which would explore the unravelling of Stanley’s reality. But in this case, we’ve only reached the end of chapter three. And this pacing is true of most bizarro fiction. It maximizes the presence of the miraculous, while treating it as merely another fictional event.

One goal of the genre, I think, is to produce absurd events as a nauseating pace. Bizarro fiction strives to be has heavy-handed and fast-paced as possible: to generate an interminable stream of reality-bending events that must be endured (by protagonist and the committed reader) because they have no consequences. If we may go back to the video store for a moment, this pacing is reminiscent of surrealist films (such as Un Chien Andalou (1929)), with their dream-like sequencing, but also recalls The Faces of Death videos, which show only the horrific parts, without the narrative framework that would make them more than violent sensation. Today, the impossible is rendered inconsequential through the massive overproduction (in terms of quantity and quality) of superhero narratives—ones in which the protagonist(s) endure a relentless barrage of mind/body altering events so that the viewers can suffer the barrage of CGI effects. The gluttony of sensational events is treated with flippant irony by most bizarro writers, as it is here, although Bassoff attempts to use the relentless pacing to explore more serious effects as well.

The plot continues to present bizarre scenarios; I won’t describe all the twists, but a few more will help us to understand this pacing. In the next chapters, the impossible events are repeated, but even more extremely. Back at work, where Stanley’s new job is the same as his previous one (he has effectively replaced himself), co-workers steal his lunch, mock him, accuse him of harassing them, beat him up, and escort him from the building. On the way out, his boss asks him to “finish underwriting the Sampson loan,” and Stanley assures him that he will (29). At home, Wendy is on the couch watching another movie, but this time she’s joined by Jeff, a “blue-collar” guy who seems to have taken over the role of husband. He sits with Wendy on the couch, eats across from her at the dinner table, and lays with her in the bed. All the while, Stanley stands around awkwardly, making ineffective comments that are ignored; eventually he curls up like a dog at the base of the bed. Although Stanley is “understandably furious” at this usurpation of his place in the household, he “thought of all the homeless people in faraway cities forced to sleep in bus stations and street corners and decided that sleeping at the foot of the bed in his own beautiful house wasn’t all that big a sacrifice” (43). At this point, the story’s absurdity has doubled: not only are the events impossible, but the narrator’s complacency is beyond belief. But we’re not done yet. Stanley gets a call from his estranged father, whose dying. He rushes to his father’s house, where the old man makes several references to the Oedipal story before expiring. Stanley drives home, where Wendy mocks him until finally he breaks down: “Stanley sat down on the bed and placed his head in his hands. And then he began sobbing. He knew it was pathetic . . . He wished so badly that he could be someone else . . . But no, he was stuck with himself, forgettable, impotent, and static” (55). However, this suffering doesn’t mark a pause in the narrative. A few pages later, still pursuing the rabbit, Stanley looks under the bed, where he discovers “a baby boy, his body slicked with blood” (57). Stanley nurses the newborn, then it’s back to the office, where he’s feted as a new father. Also, the panicked man in the house next door is back, and the photograph has continued to push Stanley out of the frame.

It goes on like this, with more and more dramatic twists. Stanley takes a job as a mortician. He’s chased by a group of doctors. He enters his neighbor’s house and becomes his neighbor. Now his name is Kurt Wagner and he’s the Midnight Monster. He visits his former boss, Mr. Elliot, and slits his throat. When the cops arrive, they recognize him as the mortician and leave him with the body of his victim, which he puts into a wheelbarrow and pushes down the suburban street. Each new absurdity doubles down on the previous ones until it becomes nearly impossible to care what happens next. According to the tenets of mainstream narrative, the inability to care what happens to the protagonist is always a flaw, but in bizarro fiction, it’s a goal. And it’s more than that; it’s an aesthetic ethos that asks us to endure the surfeit of absurdism well beyond the limits of literary propriety. It’s like what happens to hotdogs at a hotdog eating contest, or to cats when you watch way too many funny pet videos. Whatever tastefulness the original object may have possessed, the hyper-consumerist overcommitment to it promotes a mental gag reflex. Bizarro fiction stages this overproduction / overconsumption, making a kind of abject mockery of itself (and, as in the case of Stanley, of its characters, who suffer regular episodes of emotional and physical pain).

In this regard, The Drive-Thru Crematorium stands out for its attempt to situate these events within a satire of consumerist society. Bassoff partially resists an attitude of nihilism that is common in other bizarro fiction, and in a lot of contemporary weird culture. Where most bizarro books prefer parody or pastiche, he goes for satire, which is always a little more serious. (Satire can be funny, of course, but it is distinguishable from parody in its willingness to stake out a moral position.) The satire has two major targets: the objective world of suburban consumerism and the subject that finds a home there. As Bassoff explains, “I certainly don’t want to be glib because I know that in the suburbs there are a lot of hard-working people who are doing the best for themselves and their families. That said, I do feel like the generic-nature and the conformity of space of the suburbs can be somewhat soul sucking. It’s hard to ever develop a real sense of place. Not impossible, but hard. I didn’t really mean for the book to be a critique of the suburbs, though. Instead, it was the right setting for my character. Nondescript. Unimportant. Easily forgotten.”

Suburban culture is satirized through the continual listing of interchangeable brand names. Stanley and Wendy live in “a freshly-built development full of streets with names like Meadow Lane, Sunbird Avenue, and Willow Way” (13). After being thrown out of the office, Stanley visits a mall. He parks “in front of the Olive Garden” and walks “through the food court, past whining kids and agitated parents waiting in line for Chick-Fil-A, Sbarro, and Orange Julius” (30). He then drives “up and down Fillmore Avenue, packed with stores like Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Subway, Starbucks, Walgreens, Dollar Tree, Taco Bell, DVS, and Target. The new American West” (31). Driving around, he listens to Kenny G. and then Celine Dion, . . . Engelbert Humperdinck and Peter Cetera” (31). As Basoff related to me, “adult contemporary pairs nicely with our suburbs. Easy. Non-threatening. And that’s what my protagonist needed. And maybe, just maybe, there’s a little bit of an unapologetic romantic in Stanley Maddox, my narrator, the kind of romantic that sings along when Olivia Newton-John swears that ‘I honestly love you.’”

A few chapters later, after having his father’s body cremated, Stanley’s “famished.” “Chili’s, The Village Inn, or Denny’s were all scrumptious choices, but he decided on the new Red Robin Restaurant” (79). At his table, “Stanley flipped through the menu, his mouth literally watering at the meal descriptions:

Whiskey River* BBQ: A smoky, tangy tribute to the Wild West. Bourbon-infused Whiskey River* BBQ sauce, crispy onion straws, Cheddar, lettuce, tomatoes and mayo.

A.1.* Peppercorn: Hardwood-smoked bacon, melted Pepper-Jack, A.1.* Peppercorn Spread, tomatoes and crispy onion straws on an onion bun, making this burger worthy of five stars.

Chili Chili* Cheeseburger: You might need an extra napkin. Served open-face with a generous helping of Red’s Chili Chili*, Cheddar cheese, chipotle aioli and diced red onions.

And so on, and so on. (82-3)

These details provide the context for appreciating bizarro fiction’s fascination with the queasiness of “too much,” rather than “not enough.” As a genre, it tries to meet capital’s relentless production of consumable experiences on its own turf. Before he becomes Kurt Wagner, Stanley spends an afternoon with the man, who runs the titular crematorium. Wagner tells him about his collection of serial killer memorabilia: “A Christmas card from Ted Bundy. A lock of hair from Charles Manson. A windbreaker owned by Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker. A brick fragment from Ed Gein’s hardware store. And so on” (75). In this world, everything has a market, even the most hideous crimes. Given the enormous market in “true crime” TV shows and podcasts these days, this satire hits a pretty wide target. The second-hand consumption of hideous events is a burgeoning form of the capitalization of culture. Wagner explains how in prison John Wayne Gacy “produced some truly bizarre artwork. Elvis, the Seven Dwarfs, Charles Manson, to name a few of his favorite subjects” (75). Poorly rendered drawings of pop-cult icons by serial killers is an excellent “objective correlative” for weird fiction. (Rest in peace, T. S. Eliot.)

Within this cultural wasteland, Stanley, his wife, and his boss at Evergreen Lending represent subjects whose dominant qualities include satisfaction, passivity, and a willingness to accept / reproduce the world, however absurd or horrific it becomes. In our email interview, Bassoff explained that “While there are certainly elements of satire in my fiction, I’ve always been more interested in exploring the psyches of wounded characters. That’s where I start. I became inspired to write my first novel after reading a bunch of Jim Thompson’s books. . . Thompson was a paperback writer in the 50s and the 60s, and most of his best novels were told from the point-of-view of psychopaths. Books like The Killer Inside Me and Savage Nights.” The flavor of Thompson’s work is most evident in the characterizations. Like many of Thompson’s characters, Bassoff’s subjects meet adversity with clichés. Stanley embodies what Herbert Marcuse, more than a half-century ago, termed “One-dimensional man.” He lives in a suburb where the houses are so identical that “on more than one occasion Stanley had pulled into the wrong driveway,” but “the nondescript architecture and neighborhood conformity comforted him” (13). “The furniture was Ikea. The decorations Pottery Barn. They were so happy” (14). Wendy watches Hallmark movies. “It’s called Devotion Comes Softly,” she explains. “It shows how God can help you overcome any obstacle, no matter how big and impossible it might seem” (14-15). Stanley seems to share this belief; the first half of the story shows him “forcing thoughts of gratitude” despite the impossible circumstances that he faces (43). Again and again, he is revealed to have no inner resources. His thoughts are always the most cliched possible in the given circumstances. At one point “he drove down the avenue, past one strip mall after another,” wondering how “he could make things right” with Wendy: “most likely by buying some flowers (Lavender Fields Mixed Flower Bouquet—VASE INCLUDED!) and a Hallmark Card (It’s the time of year / that the world opens / to all kids of beauty / the way you open my world / to all kinds of love). That was the magic of life—it was never too late to make things right again” (85).

Disposable culture and its superfluous subjects are symbolized in the drive-thru crematorium of the title. Stanley visits the establishment, a mash-up of funeral home, fast-food franchise, and car wash, on numerous occasions. As Kurt Wagner, he works as a mortician there. The idea behind the franchise is explained near the story’s end: “people could come by after work or during their lunch break and they wouldn’t need to deal with parking or make small talk with people they might have conflict with. They could have a few minutes of private viewing while music played overhead and then they could sign the book . . . If meals could be purchased with such convenience, why not funeral viewings? Eventually, . . . they would be able to place a flashing sign that read, ‘Over one million buried,’ just like at McDonald’s” (131). This double melancholia (the death of mourning) haunts the genre. It presents itself as fast food fiction: entertainment in a world where instant gratification in the imperative.

Conclusions

As exemplified by The Drive-Thru Crematorium, bizarro fiction appears to be a version of contemporary literary weirdness that maximizes absurd and grotesque sensations at the expense of psychological and descriptive realism. It deliberately offends any sense of good taste, civility, or discrimination the reader may have been harboring. As literature, it certainly does the job of reflecting the grossness of late capitalism. It articulates an attitude of cynical disappointment with 21^st century U.S. culture, without glimpsing an outside to that culture. It resonates with the 4-chan and 8-chan memes that helped to elect Trump, whose brazen ugliness and shameless sensationalism was predicted by the genre. It enjoys irreverent humor and makes a virtue of disgust. I asked Bassoff about this resonance. He explained that “it’s hard for your work not to respond in some way to today’s political nightmare. It’s no coincidence that some of the most powerful art comes from the darkest times in our history, and so maybe the one bright spot will be the art that comes from this history. But I don’t think my work is a direct response to Trump. I think it’s a response to what has happened in America over the past 70 or so years. The slow deterioration of our communities. The corporatization of our culture. The sense that we are anonymous, replaceable, unimportant. And, of course, the undercurrent of violence. Always the violence.”

In Episodes 20 and 21 of the Weird Studies podcast, Phil Ford and J. F. Martell discuss a phrase from a Philip K. Dick novel they find particularly evocative: “the symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash stratum.” In a culture of conformity, true inspiration must be found among the refuse. This is not a new idea; it has been an abiding principle of Western art for about two centuries. A perfect example, now more than a hundred years old, is Marcel Duchamp’s presentation of a urinal in the Armory show in 1917. To understand this principle, one must not imagine that one is seeking a pearl among the swine, but rather that the swine are the sublime object. Ralph Waldo Emerson made the same claim in “Nature” in 1836, when he argued that “Even the corpse has its own beauty.”  Bizarro fiction seeks the beauty of the corpse of contemporary culture. It does so by rejecting all claims to more conventional forms of literary quality, most notably the slower pacing of realism. The loss of realism distinguishes it from the long history of weird fiction I’ve been assuming; for most weird writers, the establishment of a fictional reality is crucial, if only to undermine that reality. Bizarro fiction begins with the assumption that contemporary life is better understood as an endless series of absurd and meaningless events, which are simply endured, without provoking a substantial transformation of their conditions of possibility.

NEXT UP: The next review follows closely on this one. My focus is Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids, a popular novel set in the world of Scooby Doo cartoons. Like many works of bizarro fiction, it approaches weirdness through a pastiche of trashy pop culture.