The Disassembled Man
Jon Bassoff
DarkFuse
June 2, 2015
Reviewed by Tim Potter
Frankie Avicious is not a nice man and he’s coming apart at the seams. Jon Bassoff’s thrilling new novel The Disassembled Man chronicles Frankie’s fall from generally unpleasant guy to completely terrible human being. And while he is a terrible person he’s also an absolutely intriguing one that will have readers asking themselves, “How can I be rooting for the bad guy?”
The Disassembled Man is a blend of noir and horror that explores the bleak and dark portions of both genres. Frankie is a normal guy at the outset, working at a tough job in a slaughterhouse and going home, usually drunk, to a wife he doesn’t love. He seems to get along from day to day until he gets it into his head that he deserves more than he’s getting. Once he decides to take what he thinks he is owed his life becomes of downward spiral of cheap booze, strange sex and all kinds of violence.
The novel is populated with a host of interesting and bizarre supporting characters. Scarlett Acres is a stripper, a staple of noir characters, but she does not possess a heart of gold and she’s certainly not putting herself through school. Frankie’s wife Ruth is unloved and ready to leave him, and her father is distant, not sharing any of his considerable wealth with his daughter and son-in-law. Frankie’s ex-cellmate Jack fades in and out of the narrative like some sort of grimey Gandalf of the Arizona desert.
Once the first blood is spilled and the first body falls characters drop like dominoes until the last page. The pace is the story is great and things don’t slow down. The first-person narrative from Frankie is lyrical and literate, full of metaphors and similes and only seems forced on a few brief occasions. The story takes an unexpected turn about three-quarters of the way through and threatens to go wildly off the rails, but Bassoff’s careful plotting keeps at least two wheels on the track and the story speeding forward to its violent climax. If you like your horror and noir bloody and brutal, The Disassembled Man is the book for you.
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