Editor’s note: Today’s review is by an anonymous reviewer friend of mine. The book in question is about some human teenagers, which is a subject that I can’t really relate to, and he kindly stepped in to read this book and provide a review.
I swear that this is a true story: In 9th grade I sat at the back of my Geography class. Now that I think about it, I don’t exactly know why I sat at the back, especially in light of the events I’m about to relate. By dent of my last name, in alphabetical arrangements I nearly always ended up at the front of classes, and I was actually an attentive student. A guy named Tony used to sit in the chair to my right.
Tony gave me the creeps. He was a messed up kid. His hair looked like he cut it himself. Tony had burn marks on his arms, and was currently living in an orphanage of sorts. He described to me in vague terms of the sorts of abuse he had received in foster homes, and talked about sleeping in dorms. Far from being a Cipher in the Snow or The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds kind of story, a rough and disturbing childhood had left Tony a 17 year old glue-sniffer stuck in the 9th grade.
Tony always called me by my last name. My memory tells me that there was something wrong with Tony, developmentally. Something you could see in his face. But at the same time there was something about Tony that was wise. And at the time I could see that he had the mental capacity to pass 9th grade Geography. Some part of me recognized that Tony had experience in real life far beyond what I had been through so far. He saw nothing stretching ahead of him but more of the same or worse, which is all I saw at the time, too, but to be fair Tony lived in an entirely different world. And there was something wrong with him.
Being 14 and male means that you get wood all the time. No need to play with it, or get excited. Just wood. Which is fucking inconvenient. It happens in every boy’s life that he gets called up to write something on the blackboard, and he can barely stand up because he’s got an erect penis stuffed halfway down the thigh of his pants. I was this age in a decade where jeans were worn tight, which made matters worse. One day in Geography class, I had an enormous, uncomfortable hard-on. And Tony saw it. This is going to sound like a joke, but he saw it, and he whispered, “Do you have a candy bar in your pocket?”
There was a lecture in progress. I looked at him, mortified, and shook my head. He said, “That’s a candy bar. You’ve got a candy bar, and you’re going to hold out on your pal Tony?”
I looked at him again, horrified. Shook my head, frowning. Probably baring teeth. Tony struggled to identify the bulge in my pants. “Isn’t that a candy bar? I can’t believe your dick could get that big. That’s a candy bar.” Then, to my horror, he reached over and grabbed it. Thinking back on the memory, it’s a miracle that I didn’t jump out of my chair.
He yanked his hand away and said, very quickly: “Worse things have happened to me.”
Worse things have happened to me.
That one line is a novel in itself. So yeah, after that, the old joke “Is that a banana in your pocket or are you happy to see me?” = Not really funny.
This book, Willy by Robert Dunbar, reminded me of Tony. It is about a group of kids who are very much like him. Here is the blurb:
In an isolated school for boys with emotional problems, a disturbed adolescent struggles against a mire of ignorance and oppression. Then he meets Willy… and the other boy – charismatic and strange – saves him.
Or damns him.
This describes the book in nutshell. The protagonist is a messed up kid who we can assume is an orphan. We meet him on the way to what will most likely the last of a series of schools. A school which we find is the place of last resort for its occupants. The book is written as his diary, and is rather believable. Dunbar is a good writer. The language is excellent and readable. The characters have great depth. The events of the book are dark.
I did have a lot of trouble getting through the book, however. I think that Dunbar planned Willy as a slow burn leading up to some shocking but sadly inevitable events. About halfway through the book, I found myself wondering when something was going to happen. When something finally happened, it didn’t really seem like enough to justify the build up. I think that if you liked being a kid, and liked doing the shit that kids did, you might like this book more than I.
A strangely equivalent book might be Jim Thompson’s masterpiece, Savage Night
except that Savage Night is about a diminutive hit man. It’s dark, you know something is going to go sour, and part of the suspense is in wondering what, when, and how bad. I was also reminded of Natsume Soseki’s Sanshiro
in that it is a coming of age story with a lost protagonist.
However, these are both very kind comparisons.
Creepy Factor: 1 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 3 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 0 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 0 out of 5
Our regular host, The Dark, reviewed Dunbar’s book Martyrs & Monsters
a year ago. He thought it was really awesome, and said that Robert Dunbar is the man with the answer to the question: “What’s the worst that could happen?” In this book I got the distinct impression that Dunbar was pulling his punches. In Willy, I really think that there were some things that should have been said.
Willy by Robert Dunbar – Uninvited Books – 2011
Buy WILLY by Robert Dunbar at Amazon
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