A Violent Masterpiece, Jordan Harper, Faber, £9.99
As a critic, I love being proved wrong. I try to approach each book objectively, but sometimes it’s difficult to suppress the desire to judge early and fast. I picked up A Violent Masterpiece by Jordan Harper and couldn’t help but think ‘we’ve got a right arrogant one here’.
The title mimics a cover-line or advertising blurb. Indeed, initially I thought the title was a quote about the book from some sycophantic pal.
Writers often get their mates to say great things about their latest novel. But no, Harper’s book really is called ‘A Violent Masterpiece’.
Convinced that the book was overhyped, I fully intended to slaughter Harper if he failed to live up to the dangerously high standards he promised.
Well, Harper was right, and I was wrong. Is his book violent? Yes, very. But more importantly, is it a masterpiece? I have to say it damn well is, folks.
What makes this book so disturbing is how closely the plot mirrors today’s deranged world.
A few years ago, the plot would have been seen as just a wild over-the-top flight of ultra-violent fancy. Today, it skirts uncomfortably close to reality.
The story centres on the crimes of an elite paedophile called Eric Algar, a Hollywood producer with bags of dirt on America’s rich, famous and powerful.
If you think it sounds similar to the Jeffrey Epstein saga, then you’re right. Algar gets bumped off in jail. While I was reading the novel a story emerged about claims linking former police to Epstein’s death. Algar is killed by a cop.
Three denizens from the Los Angeles underbelly get dragged into the case: Jake Deal, a gonzo journalist who livestreams the blood and guts of LA crime to the ghoulish subscribers on his ‘Creepy Crawl’ website; Doug Gibson, a lawyer who acts for the forgotten flotsam of America’s ice cold society; and Kara Delgado, a fixer for the rich and famous. If you want women, drugs, men - just call Kara and she’ll arrange it.
One of Kara’s best friends, Phoebe, has disappeared. Soon, Phoebe is linked to a series of brutal murders carried out by the ‘LA Ripper’. It turns out the LA Ripper was close - very close - to the dead paedophile Algar.
The three are drawn deep into the horror that rots just below the surface of American life. They team up and try to bring the truth about what’s happening in the country to public attention. This is literature for the paranoid generation.
What they uncover is a nexus of America’s most powerful people involved in a monstrous criminal enterprise. We are in the world of snuff movies, and murder for kicks.
Body parts are consumed in order to slow ageing; children are raped. Billionaire tourists travel to Africa to shoot people for sport; to experience the thrill of hunting humans. There’s even a Hollywood star who gets his kicks from cannibalism.
If you think this all sounds grotesquely familiar then you’re right again. There are strong QAnon vibes here. QAnon conspiracists believe American elites are worshipping Satan and drinking the blood of children.
Harper alchemises modern horror.
And as for the Hollywood cannibal, well, last year the actor Armie Hammer had to deny claims of cannibalism on the Louis Theroux podcast.
The world has gone completely mad, and Harper is the chronicler of the madness.
What makes this book so much more than simply an homage to, or riff on, the insanity of the dark side of the 2020s, is its style.
This is the best hardboiled detective fiction since James Ellroy was at the height of his powers. The violence has the flourish of Brett Easton Ellis in American Psycho. The tension, jeopardy and pacing are as strong as Thomas Harris when he’s serving up Hannibal Lecter.
The book throbs with a neon, drug-fuelled, digital heat. The streets are lined with either the beautiful and the damned, or the lost and the desperate. Everyone is taking bumps of ketamine, getting their nose shaved by plastic surgeons, launching meaningless new apps, chugging fake wellness tonics, obsessing on crypto, auditioning for reality shows.
This is Trump World in all its filthy squalor.
Yet the book has a streetwise softness sometimes that reminded me of the movie Casablanca when it comes to the growing love between Jake and Kara.
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Our three central characters ground us in decency - albeit very flawed decency - when we’re surrounded by devils.
In LA, private securities companies can be hired for murder; publicity agents moonlight as professional blackmailers; doctors harvest organs; and there’s no dividing line between sex and violence. Fathers ingest their children’s blood; friends murder friends; billionaires buy people; Nazi cops kill with no fear of justice.
What raises this book beyond the level of its shock value, is its message. Harper is saying much the same as F Scott Fitzgerald said in The Great Gatsby, albeit in a starkly different fashion.
He’s saying: ‘You think this is the American dream? Wrong, this is an American nightmare’. In fact, this is the ‘American carnage’ Trump once heralded. America is the violent masterpiece.
As one of the book’s nastier characters says: “The weapon is the true American art form.”
Another echoes Fitzgerald’s famous line: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.”
Here we’re told how the rich and famous “soak themselves in their pleasures, over and over again, until they can’t feel it anymore. That’s what drives them nuts. The numbness. The boredom of the pleasure-dome … So they make worse messes and worse messes and somebody else cleans them up.”
Jake, Doug and Kara, though, want to make sure the messes don’t get cleaned up, that the messes - the bodies, the rapes, the abused kids - are put out there before the eyes of the people once and for all.
In a way, this is a modern Robin Hood tale, and we sure as hell need that these days.
We need a story about the little people standing up to the rich and taking them on; we need a story in which the sins of the powerful are finally exposed and the sinners laid low in a very public act of revenge.
Harper chose the most audacious title possible, and rightly so.
