Like many readers of this book, I would have never heard of it if not for Stephen King's recommendation in the afterword to The Dark Half. In The Dark Half, a King-esque author has a Bachman-esque alter ego named George Stark. This Stark fellow writes violent crime novels featuring a protagonist named Alexis Machine. That name, Alexis Machine, is King's homage to Dead City, a novel that he says is "about the dark side of the American dream."
Dead City was a disappointment. It is relentlessly depressing and one-dimensional.
I think a big reason why people enjoy mob movies and TV shows about the Mafia is because they depict the domestic sphere. Criminals are humanized by their home lives. In The Godfather, a Mafioso shows a guy how to make tomato sauce. Later on, he shows the same guy how to load a gun. The two scenes are identical. A patient old hand showing a new guy the ropes. This is deliberate.
There is NO such subtlety in Dead City. The novel is almost entirely devoid of family life, save for a short half-chapter concerning mob boss Joe Zucco's paralyzed wife, and even this is only mentioned because the electric wheelchair Zucco buys her for their twenty-fifth anniversary becomes an important plot point later on.
Dead City has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the face. Eyes are gouged out, children are murdered, people are set on fire, a man is skinned alive, longtime friends betray each other at the drop of a hat, women are beaten and raped and told to shut up, people who have power chase after MORE power, people with no power chase after SOME power. I'm not against violence, it's just really self-conscious here. Not stylized, just out in front. Everybody is furious in this book. Everybody is super sensitive. Gangsters who crack jokes find themselves the target of vengeful broodings.
One thing Dead City attempts to comment on is the increasing professionalization and corporatization of the American Mob. The comment is vague, but it's there. In the 1970s, modern management strategies were elbowing out the cowboy, even in the Mafia. There were fewer Joey Gallo-types and more faceless bean counters.
*SPOILER ALERT*
In this novel, men who kill for pleasure or for honour find themselves dead. Only those who kill for business reasons are still alive at the end.
Dead City is a mesmerizing read, but it suffers from its cartoonish depiction of crime and criminals. Readers and TV viewers of today are much more savvy about the nature of crime than your average American in 1973, the year Dead City was published. Indeed, one of the things people loved about The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, et al, and the revelation these shows handed down, was that the day-to-day operation of a criminal enterprise is every bit as hierarchical and boring as a legit one. Shane Stevens doesn’t know this. His criminals spend all their free time in massage parlours, getting blowjobs, or getting in bar fights where they snap men’s arms like pencils.
We get brief and savage glimpses into the inner lives of these men and all they think about is double-crossing whoever is just above them on the underworld ladder. These frequent reveries are often broken by gunshots out of blue (very few characters survive this novel). Nobody trusts each other, everybody is just one itchy trigger finger away from the double-cross. One last thing: these criminals are really stupid. Stump dumb. Their small talk is almost unbearable.
All the characters do is:
1. Kill each other
2. Think about killing each other
3. Suspect each other of thinking about killing each other
4. Get killed because they weren’t paying attention because they were fantasizing about killing each other
Another major problem here is setting. It's just as one-dimensional and cartoonish as the people. The industrialized landscape of Jersey City is so exaggerated and overdone that Dead City reads more like a post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel than a Mob book set in an America only 4 years removed from the idealistic 1960s. Was the national mood really THAT grim in 1973? Why? Because gas prices went up?
Check this typical passage: “The winds died, black pitch streets turned soggy and stuck to shoes, garbage festered in sun-speckled slums spilling onto sidewalks bleached with fatigue.” The book is rife with descriptions like this. The New Jersey piers are broken and falling into the river, tenement buildings are crumbling, bars smell like piss and blood, every single neighbourhood oozes phlegm and bile, the gutters are filled with dog shit (one character even steps in it and starts cursing), grass is dead. Every human being is a selfish psychopath, incapable of thinking about anything but his or her own advancement.
One of the two main characters, a young Vietnam veteran named Harry, gets a job working for local mob boss Joey Zucco. That very night, Harry has a dream where Zucco knocks on his door and appoints him “king of kings.” So he wakes up and starts beating off, turned on by the thought of power. That's how immature these men are. In another dream, Harry is chased down a school hallway by a man carrying a gun the size of a tank. All the classrooms are locked, and when he looks behind him, all he sees is the gigantic gun. He wakes up screaming. When his girlfriend asks him what’s wrong, he flies into a rage and fantasizes about killing her. This is the whole book.
The other main character, Charley Flowers, lives in a seedy motel. Early on, there is a scene where his neighbour summons Charley over, trying to ascertain if his wife is sick. The two men stand over the bed-ridden woman and decide she's faking. The very next instant, she vomits all over herself. Flowers goes back to his motel room, fuming. "It's always the same losers in these places," he fumes, "having the same arguments." This is Dead City. This is the whole book.
There is even a bizarre ritual carried out (one I've NEVER seen or read before) in which the poor saps about to be killed by the Mob are forced to drink a bottle of cow's blood? What the hell IS this? A Mob novel or a vampire book? These victims KNOW they are going to die, so why do they drink the blood? I've read a lot of Mafia books and watched a lot of Mafia TV shows and movies, I've never heard of gunmen forcing a victim to drink blood before they shoot him. What the hell is Shane Stevens talking about?
Harry and Charley are ten years apart, but they both exist on the fringes of Mob life. They both want up. The novel is supposed to be a dark mirror image of the American rags-to-riches, up-by-your-bootstraps narrative. These men have nothing but they want something. They are both too fatally stupid and impulsive to realize they'll never be promoted. They're too much trouble. Everywhere they go they start fights, even during important jobs. They make so many mistakes, you're amazed Zucco puts up with them. Then again, even Joe Zucco has the temper of a rabid six-year old. He frequently ruminates on how much more he would own if he could just control his fierce temper.
Charley and Harry do jobs throughout the book. They kill people. During one botched job, Charley's brother is brutally shot to death. So he starts drinking. One night he leaves the bar and his companion is shot to death. Dead City goes on and on like this. It's a hallucinatory and hellish journey.
Ultimately it's hard to root for anybody in this book. They're all despicable. They whine non-stop. Criminals in real life might lack imagination, but they aren't THIS dumb. The ones in Dead City are practically zombies. Maybe this was intentional, hence the title. They don't talk like real people, they don't act like real people, they don't think like real people.
Dead City seems to think that the Mafia exists to inflict maximum pain and torture on its enemies. It doesn't. The Mafia exists to make money. To reap profits, not bodies. Honour doesn't matter. Neither does revenge. Ultimately, THAT'S the horror of the Mob. That for all the talk of brotherhood and togetherness, the Mafia ONLY cares about the money. There IS a hollowness to the life, but it's not inside the criminals' heads as Dead City seems to believe. It's in their hearts. They're not illiterate idiots, they're predators who profit.
In conclusion, Dead City is fast and fun but ultimately shallow. The violence exists more for shock value than anything else. Not sure I'll seek out another Stevens novel. His worldview is too unbearably bleak. I've read books about the Holocaust that contain more human hope than this wretched document. And he hasn't the SLIGHTEST clue what to do with women. All the girls in this book are either nagging housewives or coked-up shrews. There is ZERO complexity of character, not anywhere, not the men, nor the women. For this reason, the book is more an interesting document than a thing that feels alive. This book doesn’t live and breathe. It just exists, like a dead waxen corpse. Great books reach across time. This one doesn't. A door has slammed between our world and the world this book comes from.