Customer Reviews

Blankety Blank

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This book would be close to one of the best books I read this year. It's really unusual. It takes reality to strange new places. Truth and lies blend into one superbly written `memoir' about Blankety Blank, a serial killer in the suburbs. I used this for a case study at uni this year for an essay on postmodern representations of suburbia. The way it reaches out for those pure, idealistic 1950s suburban ideals, yet completely misinterprets them/bastardizes them, it led me to conclude that this book is about the death of suburbia in contemporary cultures. Examining the book in that context really opened it up to new perspectives for me. The first time I read it was just for the pure absurd fun of it. Sure, the warped consumerist undertones are there, but it wasn't until I studied it at some level that I realised just how sophisticated and clever it was. I mean, I already knew it was brilliant and sophisticated and clever, but it is fantastically beyond just about everything else I've read this year. It is not just a bizarro book, it is an ultraviolent parody of the American Dream, something that people seem desperate to hold on to, but realistically, they never will.

I have lived in a suburb much like Vulgaria and I must say Wilson has it right. The people in these neighborhoods get stuck in their little identity/property wars not only with their neighbors, but with themselves. In everyone of these neighborhoods there is a serial something (peeper, vandalizer, dirty mouth, etc), all of them have the disturbing power to rock these people out of their little identity ruts. Wilson's serial killed does what the other serial (vandalizer, peeper, and dirty mouth) can't, he destroys the vulgar imaginary world these people live in. In other words, Wilson hates these neighborhoods as much as I do.
I highly recommend starting here if your new to Wilson's work. This is also a great place to get introduced to the growing Bizarro genre.

A serial killer from a bizarro world that only Wilson could make up.
Rutger Van Trout haunts the neighborhood with a brilliant strange of oddness.

I lived in Grand Rapids for several years. In fact, I found out that if I had stayed there, my children would have attended the same high school as D. Harlan Wilson. Does this scare me? No, I'm pretty sure the schools in that particular area of Grand Rapids are not responsible for turning your average kid into a writer of disturbing and bizarre fiction. D. Harlan Wilson must have been a special kind of special. BLANKETY BLANK: A NOVEL OF VULGARIA is my current favorite book. I'd read THEY ALL HAD GOAT HEADS, so I thought I kind of knew what to expect from Wilson's novel, but, no, this was way better. The story centers around a suburban family man by the name of Rutger Van Trout (playing on Michigan's Dutch heritage), who lives in a McMansion in Grand Rapids, surrounded by other McMansions. Well, he has an incredible urge to differentiate himself from the herd. Craziness involving skeletons, lycanthropia, and sausages ensues. The really disturbing part, though, involves the strangest serial killer I've ever read about.

And I look for him standing in my front yard at night and watch over my shoulder when I go out running!

Watch out for BLANKETY BLANK!

Thank you, D. Harlan Wilson, for a hilariously disturbing read!