Ben Winch's Reviews > Vanishing Points: A Pulp Triptych

There’s a great moment in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ when token pasteboard Russian game-character Yevgeny Nourish shouts ‘Death to realism!’ before setting fire to a diseased game-pod which, until that moment, has dispensed anything but realism. In this apparently mixed-message manifesto I find meaningful similarities with the pulp triptych Vanishing Points. Whether it can lay claim to the same mastery is questionable (its author was 23 when he wrote it, and subsequent drafts may only have focussed his youthfulness) but somewhere at its heart is a power-drunk revolutionary, setting fire to dispensers of irreality (AKA genre conventions) under the banner of anti-realism and having the time of his life doing so.

Imagine Forbidden Planet crossed with ‘MS Found in a Bottle’. We’re in this strange world as the story unfolds, via the whispered, shouted, static-strafed log of the wayward Captain Kurtz:

It’s late. I should be sleeping. Look at me: a shivering coward huddled in a plastic dome. Damn it, what’s happening here?... I’ve had a dream, and it haunts me, though it passed in an instant. I dreamt of... an eye. A single red iris surrounded by black, and the wide-open pupil at its centre. It was ancient, this eye, as if made of stone, and so huge I could not look away from it. When I tried to, it surrounded me. When I ran to escape, it was infinite. And as I awoke I was falling, plummeting through space towards it...

Guns are fired. One by one, the crew disappears in the fog, only to be transformed – like Lynch’s Fred Madison – before the cycle winds up and... starts again.

A noir fairytale city, steam pouring from sewer gratings as trenchcoated men scurry between red-lit doorways – Jim Thompson meets Kafka in a steam-punk (‘petrol-punk’?) 1950s that never was. Meet 5D pornstar Buck Wilder, test pilot for an ill-fated technology. A Mind’s Eye implant in his forehead transmits sensations to an audience in tri-coloured glasses, which controls him, under the direction of inventor/auteur E.T.A. Horner:

How to compete with the king? 5D, in theory, was democratic. And maybe later, when Wilder fans packed the place to the rafters, it was. But in those days it was a dictator and his subjects. You put on the glasses – bam! – and you’re in some poor sap’s head. But a roomful of deviants is in there too, and when they see which way Horner’s pushing, you’d best go along for the ride.

Disappearance, transformation and... the wheel spins again. Some Nowheresville Sheriff’s office, where the lone teenage survivor of a bloodbath at the lake gives his testimony:

You’re from around here Sheriff, so you’re probably used to it, but I got the creeps the moment we started up that mountain. Under an arch of twisted trees the road turned to dirt. We followed a tight corridor to nothingness. A car’s length ahead, the forest materialised from the fog. A car’s length behind us it dissolved. Then we broke through. The sun set across a sea of cloud. A few crags poked through like islands, throwing long shadows across the cloud. The road hugged a sheer wall of rock. Then we rounded the curve to a crater – a huge couldron, bubbling with fog – and started down.

But just who is this scarred ‘Streetcorner Man’, who tells his latter-day Body Snatchers tale as if it were just another day at the office?

‘Genre parody’? If the author’s done his work, it’s something more. It’s a truism, but genre in Vanishing Points operates as a springboard, to lift us to realms denied us by ‘realism’: metaphysics, magic, madness, irreality. There’s nothing new in that: the Surrealists used porn for the purpose; Kubrick used whatever he could (sci-fi, horror, war film, period drama). But what may be new is the triptych: the same psychic/emotional vectors, the same essential situation, but viewed through the distorting agents of three mutually exclusive genres. Each story inhabits a unique world, but it’s as if they stemmed from the same seed, the same ur-text, which they invite us to uncover. Three points to make a straight line, after all (so Roithamer). Three vanishing points.

And the verdict? The star-rating? One, for what it isn’t. Five, for what it could be. The truth is (quietly): W. COQ, c’est moi. If you’re interested, read the excerpts at Vanishing Points Online. Friends, write me at Goodreads and I’ll send you a free copy. Oh, and so Eddie Watkins’s discreet review isn’t for nothing, mum’s the word re the me-as-COQ thing, eh?