Satan Burger by Carlton Mellick III
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I am a fan of Carlton Mellick III. In some ways, this wasn’t the most ambitious of Mellick’s novels that I have read but in some ways, it became the most meaningful, and most dramatic.
This book started off what seemed excruciatingly slow, as it had many scattered components, Mellick was able to bring to together in a period of about 20 pages near the end…to speed through to the final conclusion, in which we see that even in nihilism, we have humanity.
Satan Burger tells the story of a few chosen punks, misfits in the skeletal remains of a capitalism gone awry, a capitalism that is comatose; when people are no longer people: when lifestyle choices override understanding, community, humanity and idealism. In the midst of this existential crisis was had become only one sustained boredom, it seems that we don’t care anymore, about who we are, what we are doing and what we love. And yet, we find out that when the last moments of the apocalypse are upon us, when we have the freedom to really just do whatever we want (because the symbolic order has deteriorated to never be resurrected), we discover that we do in fact care, we do love, and we do want a better future.
The seemingly cowardly narrator, Leaf, who floats around in the human refuse of post-capitalism, post-meaning, post-struggle, comes on his own, realizing that we do have a choice, that God, through not caring about humanity, has a given him a choice. Save himself, save humanity or risk eternal zombification to save his friend.
In a way, Mellick is writing about the tail end of Gen-X, which fell from the dreams of a capitalist utopia of endless party, success and validation, to find a banal lifeworld devoid of joy… in which, in Zizek’s words, “Enjoy!” was the superego command of the day. What was left after Enjoy! is where this novel starts, in a nihilistic world: post-jaded, post-ambition and post-beauty, where even being offended took too much effort. We gave ourselves up, to get the dream, and in the end, found only endless repetition of the same boring mosh. But I guess once you’ve seen the party (and as a result, the endless parties that follow ad infinitum), there’s nowhere left to go but down…. and once you’ve done that, strangely enough, as Mellick shows us, there’s nowhere to go but up.
To quote Richard Farina’s post-hippie work, where dreams die to leave their ghosts to haunt us again: “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me”
And though the first sections of the book seem overwrought with strange tendrils that lead nowhere, Mellick shows us best in the last pages, that there is something to the end, even when words abandon us. Well worth the read.
Comments (0)