Scream Queens of the Dead Sea: A Novel [Hardcover]

Gilad Elbom (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 4, 2004

When a young graduate of the Israeli army decides to moonlight as an assistant nurse at a mental institution in Jerusalem, the job seems like a nice break from everyday life in the Promised Land. What could be easier than exercising power over a small group of heavily medicated zombies? But as the human inventory inside the insane asylum begins to mirror the psychotic norms of the outside world, the inexperienced ex-soldier finds himself trapped in a hilarious yet terrifying freak show, surrounded by a motley crew of mad patients gone madder: a religious poet who writes obsessive love sonnets to a Hollywood porn queen, a charming racist who wears only purple, a criminally insane murderer who doesn't believe in anything (not even in nihilism) . . . and that's just for starters. Here is a fast-and-furious first novel saturated with ruminations on sexual aberration, heavy metal, structural linguistics, horror movies, and satanic poetry - the good things in life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. What is sanity? In a smart, animated debut novel set in a Jerusalem mental hospital, Israeli writer Elbom searches for an answer (via a first-person narrator and literary proxy also named Gil Elbom) and burrows through sensitive subjects (sex, politics, religion, mental illness) with frank honesty and dark humor. Working as an assistant nurse on a psychiatric ward, the author-as-narrator transcribes his life into his book, serving up diverse characters that include his sardonic girlfriend who is awaiting her sick husband's death ("Sorry I couldn't make it last night. He's still alive") and an impersonal doctor who says that the "best thing to do when dealing with the mentally ill is to keep a distance." As far as patients go, there's an intelligent murderer who claims that atheism is a psychiatric illness called "Faith Deficit Disorder"; a man obsessed with writing purple love poems to a porn star; and a woman who's convinced she's dead. Elbom's lively, present-tense narrative pulls the reader into the story; at the same time, Elbom steps outside to include a considerable amount of detailed self-criticism, such as when he interrupts his tale to comment on the ineffectiveness of his use of asterisks between sections. The result is a multifaceted, hilarious and excruciatingly honest novel.
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From Booklist

Brazenly searching out black humor and even satire amid the political quagmire of the Holy Land, this debut novel offers a startling departure from the elegiac tone once so common in Israeli fiction. The affably irreverent narrator, an ex-soldier who now works in a mental institution, regales us with tales from the psych-ward patients; reflections on his dueling obsessions, heavy metal and linguistics; and blow-by-blow accounts of sexual trysts with his married lover. Writing in a self-conscious style, a la Dave Eggers, in which the novelist admits his indulgence in "pseudo-reflective asides, self-referential ruminations, and amateur linguistic interludes," Elbom effectively captures the Jewish Israeli version of Generation X. His style is a little too self-indulgent and his plot a bit too meandering, but Elbom's acerbic wit offers more than enough compensation. Humor is born of pain, he reminds us, in this moving evocation of a country so rife with violence that our hero takes comfort in the fact that people can still die in normal ways, such as car accidents. Misha Stone
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press; First Edition edition (October 4, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568583222
• ISBN-13: 978-1568583228
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,571,187 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Both zany and serious--an excellent and original book, February 19, 2005

By 

Chris Wells - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Scream Queens of the Dead Sea: A Novel (Hardcover)

First of all, some reviews I've read appear to want to make much of the book's status as "metafiction." Yes, here the metafiction works--but why? It seems that in this novel metafiction has finally reached a point where it's not even "experimental" anymore; it serves a simple artistic purpose. Because the book deals so much with mental illness, I understood metafiction simply as the acknowledgement that this is Gilad Elbom's (properly meaning here the character of the same name as the author, which of course is no accident, but anyway...) way of acknowledging that this is not an authoritative reality he is weaving but, largely, a record of his own complexes confronting a sort of "given" outside himself. The metafiction is not overbearing; for the most part it reads as a straightforward fictional narrative, and a fun one too.

The plot centers around an era of Elbom's life when he works in a mental hospital in Israel and its setting both inside and outside of this hospital. Elbom records his experiences on the inside mainly as the social interactions he has with, and observes between, six patients whose illnesses/quirks have been covered elsewhere. On the "outside" Elbom records his experiences with Carmel, a married woman waiting for her terminally ill husband to die; with a man who had his vehicle "drafted" by the Israeli army; with said army as they, in their way, "draft" Elbom's vehicle by asking (forcing) him to take soldiers between bases; with a very friendly, hospitable Arab associated with HAMAS who collects motorcycles and goes into an unexpected (even somewhat feminist?) disquisition on ancient epic poetry; etc. (Read the book!) Such episodes are interrupted or embellished by Elbom's fascinations, obsessions, complexes: heavy metal, sexual fantasies of an occasionally bizarre nature, and (maybe most of all?) linguistics.

The book is driven by dialogue; in fact, it seemed to me the dialogues were the whole "point" of the novel, at least for me. If you simply excerpted a dialogue without any reference to characters, who would be speaking? Would they be the "mentally ill" or the "sane"? Cinematically speaking, the dialogues were reminiscent of both the lighter Monty Python and the more philosophical Richard Linklater, often at the same time. And it was this tension between the serious and the zany that is not only highly entertaining, but begs the question: Who is insane and why? Is a society plagued with inter-ethnic and interreligious violence "sane" while a man incapable of believing in anything "crazy"? It is fascinating to think about, and *Scream Queens of the Dead Sea* offers a lot of food for thought, especially (I thought) in the last chapter.

All throughout the novel I was trying to find something concretely inferior about this novel, yet I was having such a good time reading it. I have to give it 5 stars out of 5; this book was my sort of thing. I'm happy I read it.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the best israeli novel about metal and mental i've read, April 14, 2005

By 

Nancy "maisoui" (Denton, TX, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Scream Queens of the Dead Sea: A Novel (Hardcover)

i've pretty much given up hope in the novel these days--but this one restores some faith. the german version has a much better cover, but you've gotta read it in english to get the jokes. vive!

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "The monkey in the eyes of its mother = a gazelle.", February 12, 2005

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Scream Queens of the Dead Sea: A Novel (Hardcover)

In Gilad Elbom's witty, metafictional novel of life in Jerusalem, an iconoclastic "fictional" speaker named Gilad is writing a novel which parallels events in the life of the book's real author Gilad Elbom. The main character, a young man who studied languages and linguistics at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has taken a job as an assistant nurse in a mental hospital, and as he speaks to us in his lively and sometimes flippant style, the reader observes his personal relationships, the lives and behavior of the inmates in the asylum where he works, the uncertainties of daily life of Jerusalem, and the overriding question of what constitutes sanity in modern-day Israel.

Gilad's girlfriend Carmel is married to a dying man whose death she anxiously awaits. His patients, a motley crew whom the reader comes to know well, include an atheist who describes himself as suffering from Faith Deficit Disorder, a Beat poet who writes paeans to a porn star goddess, a woman who believes she is dead, and the Palestinian murderer of a young Israeli woman, whom the military has assigned to the asylum for observation.

The dark humor of daily life in Israel permeates the novel, from Gilad's delay of his departure for work until he has heard that the daily deaths and bombings by terrorists have already occurred (and have missed him once again), to his running around to military camps throughout the country to obtain files and paperwork for one of his patients. His trip to the Palestinian territories to a casino (populated entirely by Jews, since gambling is anathema to Muslims), and his attempts to take his patients on an outing to a restaurant add to the color and sense of absurdity.

Moments of hilarity abound, varying in style from rapid-fire, who's-on-first interchanges, to descriptions of personal quirks, the inclusion of absurd poems by a patient, Carmel's constant, chorus-like interruptions of Gilad's day at work, and literary discussions of Robinson Crusoe, which Gilad is trying to read at work. Stream of consciousness writing and free association, some of it related to Gilad's interest in heavy metal music, are interposed into discussions of life and literature, creating a wild, existential tone. Plot is almost non-existent. Fortunately, the light touch, the humor, the self-deprecating commentary, and the pseudo-angst of the main character provide enough intrinsic excitement and charm to keep the reader going in lieu of a "real" story. Mary Whipple