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Deadweight [MultiFormat]
eBook by Robert Devereaux
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eBook Category: Dark Fantasy Bram Stoker Award Finalist
eBook Description: Karin Tanner, having killed her husband Danny in self-defense, now visits his grave every day, leaving flowers from her garden. She has inherited from her grandmother the ability to prolong the lives of plants, indeed to restore dead plants to life. As she caresses the flowers above Danny's grave, she unknowingly brings him gradually back to life as well. When he at last claws his way to freedom, it's payback time with a vengeance. Karin's only hope is to abandon her role as a victim and use her powers to sap the life from the monster she has unleashed upon the world. This Bram Stoker award finalist pushed the envelope of explicit sex and violence, all in the service of narrative and character delineation, far beyond the high watermark established by the splatterpunk movement. In addition, reviewers and readers alike praised it for getting the dynamics of abusive relationships exactly right.
eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Dell Abyss, 1994
Fictionwise Release Date: July 2006
Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [922 KB], eReader (PDB) [240 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [245 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [213 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [223 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [267 KB], hiebook (KML) [529 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [274 KB], iSilo (PDB) [202 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [249 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [277 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [311 KB]
Words: 74583
Reading time: 213-298 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
 
"Robert Devereaux shocks me, delights me, and turns me on--none of which is easy to do. His eroticism is at once lyrical and visceral, his violence poetic, his style and subject matter daring to the point of danger. Devereaux is a major talent!"--Poppy Z. Brite
"Frankenstein meets The Valley of the Dolls--not for the faint of heart."--Gene Wolfe
"Deadweight delivers on every conceivable score ... I was left awestruck by the fact that a book could be so brainfryingly brutal and yet so richly, lovingly, extraordinarily human."--John Skipp
"Records are meant to be broken, and evolution eventually breaks them all. As the species gets stronger, faster, what have you, the feats of generations before pale in comparison to the feats achieved by more recent souls. Some records stand for decades, such as Dr. Fager's seven-furlong Belmont track record (which stood until Artax shattered it in 1998), but eventually, they come down. There are exceptions to every rule. No one has ever seriously considered that Secretariat's world record for the mile and a half distance of the Belmont Stakes is in danger, nor has anyone ever considered that it will be in the future. Some baseball records have stood for eighty years or more, never in any doubt. Many still consider Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom, made in 1975, the nadir of underground film, even as the past quarter-century has made some of Pasolini's extremities regular prime time fare.
"Extreme horror, punditized in the late eighties as 'splatterpunk,' is a genre that set out to break conventional records, and then, having achieved that, set out to break its own. Joe Lansdale took aim at Clive Barker. Ray Garton took aim at Joe Lansdale. Richard Laymon lorded it over everyone. And then came Robert Devereaux, an unassuming short-story writer who looks, more than anything, like a used-car mechanic crossed with a teddy bear. Devereaux, an almost complete unknown outside a cult following who'd been gobbling up his stories for a few years, released his first novel in the much-vaunted Abyss line from Dell, and became only the second author to publish a first novel there. Kathe Koja was the first. Kathe Koja has since become as much a household name as any horror author can be, while Devereaux has stayed unknown. Why? Because Devereaux didn't just push the envelope, he threw it onto the fire. And no one has even come close in the intervening six years. Deadweight is, simply, the most extreme horror novel ever written.
"Karin Tanner is a woman with a history of abuse. She was sexually molested by her father as a child, and the pattern of abuse continued into marriage, as it usually does. Her husband ended up getting so nasty that Karin jammed a knife into his heart and split it clean in two. The husband, Danny Daniels, was the kind of guy to bully the cemetery into letting him buy a second plot for his dog, and after Danny was killed, so was the mutt, and the two of them went into the ground together. Karin, on trial for murder, fell in love with her lawyer, a dominant personality in the courtroom, and the two got hitched. Problem is, what Frank Tanner has in the courtroom doesn't seem to translate to the home, and Karin--still looking for that pattern of abuse--is starting to wonder if the marriage is going to work. She's also going to Danny's grave. First once a week, then a couple of times a week, and finally every day for an hour or two. Karin, who's inherited the super-green-thumb that passes down through the women in her family, learns (after Danny's grave has to be filled in ... odd in this day and age, no?) that said super-green-thumb property enables things to grow--fast. Ground that was seeded only that day turns green when she concentrates on making the grass grow. And here she is spending a whole lot of time at her dead abusive husband's grave. I think you can see where this is going.
"Deadweight isn't a great novel simply because it's extreme. That would be too easy (and would also open the door to forcing the consideration of endless numbers of Friday the 13th sequels as good cinema). Deadweight is a great novel because it combines the extremity with profound insight. Karin Tanner isn't the usual cardboard-cutout heroine, and she isn't a stereotypical abuse victim, but she does react in the ways abuse victims do, and her struggle to break the cycle, even while it's complicated by the rather impossible sequence of events, never goes beyond the bounds of believability. In fact, very little in this book does, other than its premise. And the other characters here, even the minor ones, have the same complexity of construction that Karin does.
"This is definitely not a book for everyone. It ranks exceptionally high, even for splatterpunk, in the gore and sexual deviance departments. But it also stands head and shoulders above anything else in the genre, in terms of quality, extremity, and sheer brutal power. It deserves a much wider audience than it's ever been afforded."--Robert Beveridge
"The Dell Abyss line has been called 'horror's fiction equivalent of Vintage Contemporaries,' and the description, over the past two years, has been fitting. The horror genre is not limited to campy or spooky vampire, werewolf, and zombie tales as perpetuated by pop media, and Abyss' goal is determined to prove, and doing a good job of it, that horror fiction can piss in the same big pond that any 'serious' mainstream literature wades in. Even horror veteran writer John Shirley is now being published by the esoteric and venerable Fiction Collective.
"Much of the titles birthed from Abyss are what I'd call postmodern horror, or, as already self-described by an anthology put out by this imprint, metahorror. Being fully aware of itself, the new horror texts take pains to move away from the old cliches and themes that have given horror a bad name, and raise the genre to a different height. Robert Devereaux's first novel, DEADWEIGHT, joins the ranks of postmodern horror titles delightfully, both at the same time a serious cautionary tale about the consequences of domestic violence and a joyful, and sometimes absurd, read that puts some light in the darkness of the theme.
"Karin is caught up the endless cycle of spousal and child abuse that we hear about on the news everyday. The book opens up with a pre-pubescent Karin tending to a greenhouse with her grandmother, urging young Karin to take a stand from the mistreatment she suffers by her father. The irony, of course, is that Karin's grandmother is affronted by her own husband, and eventually by her son as well. She's a victim unable to take a stand herself, hoping her young granddaughter may do what she has been yearning for. The result of Karin's attempt to fight off her father's physical attacks, however, is more aggression, and then rape.
"The story quickly jumps into the future. Karin is older, married to the lawyer who helped get her off the charges of killing her first husband, Danny, a man who was abusing her--thus showing the cycle she had fallen into. However, Karin has become remorseful that, in a fervent moment, she stabbed Danny with one of his own knives. She is secretly longing for him back. With her new marriage on the outs, Karin has been visiting Danny's grave obsessively, nostalgic for the relationship they had. True, he wronged her, but she feels his love was misguided, and while he could be harsh, he had a tender side to him as well. But there is also a masochistic side to Karin, perverted from years of being raped by her father perhaps, that enjoyed Danny's rough handling coupled with sex.
"Since she murdered Danny and later married Frank (her lawyer), Karin has had the gift of bringing dead plants and flowers to life, a gift she first learned from her grandmother. The house she lives with Frank in is assuaged and mantled with the flora and fauna that her healing hands have restored. Some of these flowers she has placed on Frank's grave, and the magic she has worked into them has seeped into the ground, finding the body of Frank. The combination of her metaphysical green thumb and her mental preoccupation with Danny brings him back to life as well.
"Devereaux handles the claustrophobic writing of getting into Danny's mind, while in the grave, well. At first Danny is just a glimpse of consciousness, unaware of where he is, but feeling Karin's power reaching out. Soon he recalls that his wife had stabbed him in the heart, and he becomes apprised of where he is: buried in a coffin. He thinks he has been buried alive.The resurrected Danny isn't the same Danny he was in life. He's ten times stronger, and rises from his grave with superhuman strength, an evil soul (or lack of one), accompanied by his faithful dog, who was buried next to him and is also resurrected, just as angry and powerful as his master. While the old Danny possessed the anger he has now, he also had a calmer, logical side, which isn't present in the new Danny. The new Danny has the taste of blood in him, and becomes more horrible when he realizes he has no sense of remorse and that, in fact, he's just a walking death-zombie without an inner being.
"This is a descriptively violent book, as Danny goes on a killing rampage in search of his wife, which I'm sure will delight any fan of
splatterpunk; and like splatterpunk, there is a good deal of sex. The sex is handled comically, however, especially the buffoon of a neighbor who gets a surgical alteration to his penis in hopes to keep his sultry, air-headed wife from seeking other lovers. As the violence surmounts, and we are introduced to the full powers of Karin's magic hands, we realize that DEADWEIGHT is not just about bringing life out of death, but breathing life into life.
"Robert Devereaux's novel has come out just in the right time, where the media has been focusing on spousal violence, as in the case of Lorena Bobbitt, who reflects Karin in many ways: taking a stand against assault and battery by a husband, and salvaging something useful and good from the misfortune.
"My one gripe with the novel is the happy ending, but that's only because I'm not a fan of the happy ending. Already well-known in the horror genre as a masterful short story writer (and to be included in 1993's Year's Best Horror), Deadweight is a wonderful debut for Devereaux into the arena of the commercial novel; it makes us look forward to what he will produce in the future."--Mike Hemmingson
Prologue: Good Friday 1970
"Sweetpea, that crumpled bag of potting soil, the one that's just about empty, would you bring it to me please?" The light in the greenhouse glowed rich and spacious high above Karin's head and out beyond her grandmother. There was magic in the air, filling the greenhouse like helium fills a balloon. Long Island always seemed more vast to Karin than all of upstate New York did, mostly because of the way her head bloomed here in Granny's greenhouse.
"Okay," said Karin, loving the way Granny Eva looked at her. Her large crinkly eyes made Karin feel as airy as angels. Lifting the bag by its torn top, holding it away from her new coveralls, she felt it uncurl with unexpected weight.
"Thank you, lovely lady." Granny set the bag beside her tray of seedlings, reached inside, withdrew fists full of dark soil, dark as coffee grounds, which she fingered around the fragile plants and tamped down with her thumbs. "You know," she said, her hands moving from one plant to the next, her voice grown not angry but firm nonetheless and full of wisdom, "it's not my place to say anything, and you mustn't tell your father I did,"--Granny's eyes filled with concern and Karin shook her head to assure her--"but it's a shame how he treats you, how he treats both of you. I've seen the bruises and said nothing in all these years. But you're getting bigger now. Your mother made her choice, and it was a bad one. She could still undo it, though she has a hard time realizing that. What I'm trying to say is--oh, come hug your grandma!"
Karin saw Granny's eyes moisten. Then her own eyes teared up. She thought of Grandpa Borchert, crook-nosed and stern in his chair by the fire, his hair a wild white swirl atop his head, his spine stiff as a tomato stake in Granny's garden. Grandpa's eyes gleamed with winter fire like her daddy's eyes. Her daddy blundered around their house like a bear, big and dark and loud. He struck her mother when he felt like it, which was nearly every night. Lately, he'd taken to striking Karin too, shifting from mother to child as though they occupied one body. Karin fell now into her grandmother's embrace, heard her speak through tears: "You have a choice too, that's what I'm trying to say. Don't lose yourself. Resist when you can. Draw lines. Always keep a place that's all your own, a private place where no hurt can come to you."
Karin verged on tears but Granny's body felt too good for that. She smelled of bread ovens and loam and her big arms gave worlds of comfort. "Thank you, Granny," was all Karin could say, her heart overflowing with love.
Granny released her, yet the press of Granny's egg-blue smock still tingled on her cheek. "I have a present for you," Granny said, daubing at her eyes with one half-rolled sleeve and reaching into a secret cache below. A smile broke over her wide wrinkled face. "Early Easter," she said. "Easter's early this year anyway, I never like it coming in March like this, so I have a special gift for you, two days in advance."
Karin knew it would be a rose, a miniature rose, but it was one thing to know it and another to see it emerge from beneath Granny's workbench, to watch Granny treat it like caught sunlight, to hear her caress it with her words and see her fingertips play among its petals. The single bloom sat proudly atop its stem like a perfect strawberry, though pale, which, having decided to transform one day into a rose, smoothed out its pocks and unfurled itself like wood shavings dyed in light pink, still tight with pride, still moist with beads of strawberry juice. "It's beautiful, Granny."
"It's a Fresh Pink," Granny told her, "for your fresh young face, my Karin, and your pig-pink cheeks." She gave it like a new kitten from her palms into Karin's, speaking her catechism as to its care and feeding. Karin nodded as though she were hearing the words for the first time, but she focused on the rose, letting the perfect curve of its petals teach her fingers how to worship it, how to give it back life in abundance.
Karin had been blessed with the magic touch, Granny always said, just like Granny herself but not like Karin's mother. Karin was green not only in her thumbs but in all her fingers and toes and throughout her body, in sympathy with the plant world like those Findhorn folks who claimed to talk with Pan and the vegetative spirits.
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