Chum: Novel

Kevin Sampsell

Mark Spitzer, editor for the roguish literary journal Exquisite Corpse, has unleashed his second novel, and it's a doozy. Based on a short film sketch by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Chum is the tale of a primitive fishing village and its barbaric inhabitants. Spitzer has set the story, about a sluttish movie star who gets shipwrecked on a small Alaskan island, in modern times, and he spices his language with such porn-store platitudes as "honking hooters" and "furious hard-on."

It's not so bad when the assorted characters (bitter fisherman, inbreds, spiteful old witches and naïve teenagers) speak as if they're on Jerry Springer, but when Spitzer lets those attitudes spill over into his own narration, it... is as entertaining as any guilty pleasure.

April Berger is the shipwrecked star who finds herself under the scrutiny of an uneducated nymphomaniac, Nadine. Nadine's mistrust of the buxom blonde leads her to tell fisherman stud Yann that she's pregnant with his child. Nadine forces him to propose in the hopes that he won't get involved with April, though Yann's infatuation with the new woman has already bloomed.

It's not just Nadine who becomes jealous of the attention April gets from the island's men. In addition, a gang of bitter seahags conjures up a plan to attack the "Hollywood whore." In the meantime, Yann contemplates leaving the island with April after a final fishing trip for illegal salmon. But his ship finds itself battling El Nino in an especially harsh and brilliant chapter, whose catastrophic ending is as good as a Harry Crews finale.
— Willamette Week, Portland, OR, Nov. 21, 2002

Library Journal

This novel is based on Spitzer's translation of a film sketch by C line. He moved the setting from an island off Brittany to one in the Bering Strait and expanded the story to create one of the most grotesque, chilling tales in modern literature. The men "fish fight and f*** and the women work in the cannery wearing slate gray smocks splattered with the blood of creatures...processed into dog food." Inbred survivors of a prison ship blown astray, these sorry folk find their jobs boring but deadly and their lives routine but utterly depraved. Rape, incest, alcoholism, and crack addiction are common. When a glamorous porn star washes up after a storm, the spiteful, manipulative Mother Kralik directs a vicious cycle of lust, blood lust, and intolerance. The story's extreme darkness is almost transcended by Spitzer's powerful, poetic language and ironic humor. Strongly recommended for strong-stomached readers in medium to large academic and public libraries. Jim Dwyer, California State Univ., Chico Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Both a sophomore effort and a sophomoric ordeal, bleached free of literary color and grayed over with the lurid details of life on an Alaskan island village, depicting what happens when a shipwrecked starlet turns up on its ruthless shore. Basing his second novel on an unpublished film treatment by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Web 'zine editor Spitzer (Bottom Feeder, 1995, not reviewed) goes to the island of Lo, a place peopled with tawdry folk achieving the banal in their cruelties and indifferent harms: men rape their daughters and wives when they're not out drinking one another into homicidal frenzies; and the women, waiting for the men to return from fishing, hatch schemes of thievery and manipulation. The general human outlook here emerges from the lowest common denominator, all the world and the people in it being considered chum-blood, bone, and meat trash led by blunt cravings and raw instincts. The island is regularly battered senseless by offshore storms, and one such fury spits out the Hollywood blond April Berger. The villagers circle in on and vandalize the remains of the yacht she was sailing, while April herself is luckily rescued to the home of Father O'Flugence. A secondary love story comes into bloom when the young islander Nadine forces the sensitive, accordion-playing fisherman Yann to ejaculate, then grapples his semen-covered penis toward her vagina, angry that she has not yet reached orgasm. Like all the men on the island, Yann is entranced by the unbelievable April, and Nadine-hired by April for housekeeping duties-plots her revenge. Another storm blows up, April is killed by a cadre of murderous women, and Yann loses everything he loves. Thereby follows thedescent of Yann to the Lo level of humanity, and the fish and sharks swim through the waters as they have always done. A remarkably feeble novel, for all the yawns induced by its unimaginative scribbling, its monotonous plot, and its ridiculously self-conscious attempts to shock the reader.