Blood of Mugwump
by Doug Rice
(FC2/Illinois State University, $7.95, 140 pp.)
by Thomas Christian
The architecture along the six-block downtown district of this mid-western college town is much like you’d expect anywhere else where students and small cities meet. Nondescript, three-story brownstones whose porches are draped with Greek insignia scrawled bedsheets, two cafes, an all-natural food co-op, the sound of Nirvana meeting U2 in the air over sidewalks, and a luckygreen shamrock bullhorning another bar every third building or so.
Buried at this point in a pile of semester-ending deadlines, the students’ primary focus is on the credits; “Just get through this” becomes the mantra heard on-campus and all through the off-campus housing facilities along State Street. Fragile, weary, and willing to sell your soul forever after in exchange for some temporary peace, this is exactly the temperament with which the student enters Mr. Rice’s English class.
Doug Rice, when he’s not mentoring English studies at the university, publishes the magazine-sized Nobodaddies, a lit/zine of shorts, graphics, interviews, reviews, novel excerpts, and the general ramblings of a varied list of contributors. He’s also the author of Blood of Mugwump, a novel so intensely terrifying that those who’ve read it are either sworn to secrecy, or have disappeared altogether shortly after its consumption. It is as if the censoring wind-god Zephyr expends a negative breath weave at the mere mention of its name, coagulating a pattern of intricate cloud formations, and eventually dropping a searing, hellacious black rain over an unsuspecting population. Legend and confusion serenade the mystery of the day when an entire roomful of students were consumed by the Earth after a reading of the book. Allegedly, the ground beneath suffered a hysterical fit, opened up its crusted, molten plates and swallowed the entire room – desks, pencils, ideas, sandwiches, business majors and jocks alike – in a massive folding “V” that sucked the whole mess into an underground funhouse of flesh-eaters and holy ghosts, mutations, permutations, gender transcendent ghouls, and psychosexual madmen orgying in a cadenza of vampirical transmogrification, where only a dotting stream of a paralyzed virus blip-dotted across the surface of the bubbling cauldron, before vanishing altogether; the soul’s descent into an untraceable prism. Gone.
(Noboddadies: POB 95094, Pittsburgh, PA 15223-0694)
