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aksel_dadswell's review against another edition
5.0
This has got to be one of the best books I’ve read in years, and one of the best horror novels I’ve read, period. A wonderfully crafted neo-noir masterpiece that really slices to the bone – and the brain. Schow’s prose is unlike anything I’ve ever consumed. It’s thick and robust and clever and as bleakly, darkly funny as the book itself. It genuinely is like something to be greedily consumed, a rich, filling dish that nonetheless leaves you hungry for more – and spouting gratuitous metaphors in praise of it, apparently. The violence is unrelenting and forces you to feel every injury and cut and torment, and the horror elements are confronting, original, exhilarating and gag-inducing.
I’m in love with the characters; their fallibility, their histories, the perfectly crafted idiosyncrasies of their thoughts and hopes and dreams and failings. Schow writes his male characters with great variety; some are clever, desperate, frail, some quick-witted, some naïve, some vile and sleazy, but it’s the prostitute Jamaica who holds the book up, and is one of the strongest female characters I’ve read in years. She’s just so likeable, too. She doesn’t rely on any of the men. She’s soft but she doesn’t take an ounce of shit – or inhale any, as Rosie would say.
I can’t praise The Shaft enough. The copy I own, a limited print run by the consistently amazing Centipede Press, is a work of art in itself; beautifully bound, with wonderful artwork by David Ho. I wish it was more readily available. If you can find a copy, pay whatever it costs, because this book is worth it, and if you get a fancy edition of it then all the better. Just read it. Now.
I’m in love with the characters; their fallibility, their histories, the perfectly crafted idiosyncrasies of their thoughts and hopes and dreams and failings. Schow writes his male characters with great variety; some are clever, desperate, frail, some quick-witted, some naïve, some vile and sleazy, but it’s the prostitute Jamaica who holds the book up, and is one of the strongest female characters I’ve read in years. She’s just so likeable, too. She doesn’t rely on any of the men. She’s soft but she doesn’t take an ounce of shit – or inhale any, as Rosie would say.
I can’t praise The Shaft enough. The copy I own, a limited print run by the consistently amazing Centipede Press, is a work of art in itself; beautifully bound, with wonderful artwork by David Ho. I wish it was more readily available. If you can find a copy, pay whatever it costs, because this book is worth it, and if you get a fancy edition of it then all the better. Just read it. Now.
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