Mr Sucky is the
latest offering from Duncan P. Bradshaw and is published through his own
imprint EyeCue Productions. With a word count coming in at somewhere between a
long novella and a short novel, it’s an everyday tale of
serial-killer-becomes-vacuum-cleaner, a trope which has been woefully underused
within the genre. Vacuum cleaners had been around for some fifty years by the
time Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis but
he chickened out, preferring to use a giant insect to express his weird father
complex thing.
Those expecting gritty social commentary will be
disappointed if they pick up Mr Sucky
but those looking for some cleverly crafted bizarro fiction will find much to
enjoy here. It’s a mix of extreme horror and comedy (“Gore-Com”) which manages
to combine both elements very effectively. I’m generally not a fan of extreme
horror but when it’s presented in such a gloriously over-the-top fashion as it
is here you can’t fail to be impressed by the imagination that has gone into
some of the set-pieces. Before I started Mr
Sucky, I wondered how a vacuum cleaner could possibly murder people but now
I’ve finished the book, I feel I’ve been educated (and quite possibly know too much about the process).
So the “Gore” half of the equation works well, how about the
“Com”? It’s really hard, being funny. Many have tried before and failed but
there are some outstanding examples of horror/comedy hybridity out there too.
It’s difficult because everyone’s sense of humour is different, one man’s
side-splitting hilarity is another man’s melancholy and despair. Personally, I
pride myself on my grumpiness but I have to say that Mr Sucky had me laughing
out loud on more than one occasion. (Cue awkward conversations with my better
half as to what it was that had made me laugh. “Well, there’s this hoover,
possessed by the spirit of a serial killer, who’s just sucked someone’s
intestines out…”) It takes skill to get the blend right and it’s here in
abundance.
The “hero” of Mr Sucky
is Clive Beauchamp, a serial killer with a split personality, the two halves of
which provide the (mainly) first person narrative of the story. The events of
the novel/la take place in the Quantico motel (a reference, I presume, to the
FBI building – an organisation whose first director was J Edgar someone). Clive
is setting up his latest kill, unaware that it will be him who will be Dyson
with death – unsuccessfully as it turns out – himself becoming the victim, initiating
a chain of events which, by a series of bizarre and unfortunate turns of fate,
results in his spirit being transferred into the titular vacuum cleaner.
Following this, much chaos ensues.
To be honest, Clive’s reanimation as a domestic appliance is
one of the less bizarre things to happen as the varied cast of characters make
their appearances. It’s all very cleverly done with the humour ranging from
broad to subtle, the violence from intense to very intense. What I particularly
enjoyed was the structure of the narrative which was fractured, jumping around
in time and point of view. Reminiscent of Pulp
Fiction with its disrupted and looping timelines; Pulp Suction perhaps.
I had a blast with Mr
Sucky, enjoyed the hell out of it. It takes a strange, twisted kind of
imagination to produce something as bizarre yet enjoyable as this and, luckily
for us all, that’s exactly what Duncan P. Bradshaw has.