A Dance At The Slaughterhouse by Lawrence Block
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Don’t you just love these titles that Block comes up with for each new Scudder novel? Boneyard, Cutting Edge, so much pulp, so much gristle. And now we’ve got a slaughterhouse. Once again, Block ups the ante. Book number 9, and Scudder is getting in deeper, and the reader is too. Whereas old Matt was existentialistic and numb, modern Matt is losing a pyrrhic battle with his conscious. Morality is the ultimate victim.
Let’s really examine that word, slaughterhouse. Metaphorically, it’s used to describe a place where blood is shed, in excess, the strong and evil preying on the weak and defenseless. You can’t call a battlefield a slaughterhouse because both sides have guns. But chain kids up to metal poles and murder them? Slaughterhouse indeed.
(No, Scudder doesn’t kill any kids in this one. That’s not what I was getting at, above).
But the literal definition of slaughterhouse a place where animals are killed in the first step of digestion (kill ’em, clean ’em, cook ’em, eat ’em) is even more appropriate. Matt’s still going to AA meetings, still hanging out with his best gal (a call girl) and his best friend (a mobster) and his mission control (a jaded cop) and his amanuensis (his sponsor). Block gives us a good-old-fashioned abattoir here, where Matt chews his way through a nasty piece of meat that just gets nastier and nastier.
Makes a man see maybe what those vegetarians are talking about. Except it’s fun to dance, isn’t it. And since I didn’t end up with a bad case of indigestion, and dizzy from the fandango, I guess we’ll just have to see if the next book gets nastier, dances faster.