An extract from this book appears in
The Edge Vol 2 #1Back From The Dead
Chris Petit
Macmillan hbk, 309 pgs, £16.99; (now a Pan paperback)
Review by Gerald Houghton (2000)
There is a way in which, in lesser hands, the disturbed thrills of Back From The Dead would simply touch base with the usual Pop Culture uglies in the fruitless pursuit of a monster-twitching spark. It’s a threat that hangs heavier and heavier: you can buy a map (easier and easier as our shelves heave) and track their leylines back to the front door of the cultural touchstone you’re looking to plunder. You borrow from their doomed gravitas with a snapshot. A cultural 18-30. Doesn’t A Clockwork Orange deserve to exist as a rumour, as a half-dozen scratchy stills more than in the Warner West End? You’re just a tourist with a typewriter, John Goodman tells John Turturro in the delirious Barton Fink. Some of us have to live here.
And so does Back From The Dead. I’d suggest that Chris Petit’s extraordinary novel isn’t playing; it’s more William Burroughs than Barton Fink. It moves into the space conjured by its own personal magic and likes the wallpaper.
Youselli is a cop taken to moonlighting with the tacit approval of his superiors - they like it when their charges work security for the rich and famous. Which is how he meets jaded Jaggerish rock star McMahon. And his wife, who shows Youselli letters sent her husband by Leah, a young babysitter of their acquaintance in the early 70s. Except Leah is dead. She never got beyond those lazy French days: died in a fall. Tragic accident.
After the prosaic plod of Petit’s last, Shankill Butchers thriller The Psalm Killer, the sheer cumulative oddness of Back From The Dead comes as a blast of refreshingly foetid air. Is Leah really dead and who saw the body? Is it a scheme hatched from within McMahon’s lugubrious coterie? Or is Leah actually - literally - returned from the grave?
Petit is not a great writer (he is a striking and much undervalued film-maker), but it’s his book’s ferocious invention that marks this out as something special. Its excess-all-areas gone bad is Performance and DeLillo’s Great Jones Street. Its meaninglessly magickal underground cinema - and sinister director/fixer Blackledge - is straight out of Kenneth Anger. We get to visit New York’s Dakota Building, with its troubled history of Polanski and Rosemary’s Baby and dead Beatles. Manson. Petit is weaving a mythology, sucking down some powerful voodoo from the cultural surround. And it’s dangerous ground, spiked further by his juddering narrative, mixed voices and the incipient madness that comes to assume Youselli. The climax exhumes an air of doomed ritual.
What we’re left with is a sort of literary movie. One suspects Petit saw this more than imagined it; the novel as dictation. In the end, I’ll put my neck on the line and say that what he’s made is a Donald Cammell movie by any other name, with all the tics and frustrations and sublimity that implies. And if it isn’t, then please don’t tell me because I don’t want to know.