occult

If you've read anything from Carlton, you know your in for a treat no matter what it is. EJC is Mellick's debut, so you can expect a little amateurish elements throughout. But as a whole, the novel is a great piece of literature.

It's the story of Jesus Christ, retold in a world full of psycho sex-punks and zombies. And the good old JC is a big disco fan. Read it right now!!! Click "add to cart." You won't be sorry.

Make sure and check out Satan Burger, another epic. Perhaps his best.

Adios.

I ended up buying his Satan Burger novel and a photocopied booklet called The Baby Jesus Buttplug instead. I have to tell you I was floored by those two books. Carlton Mellick has to be one of the most outside-the-box authors living today. So I decided to go ahead and buy Electric Jesus Corpse anyway, even though the author himself warned me not to.

Well, I read the book, and FINISHED it (unlike previously reviewers), and have to say that it's better than I expected but a lot worse than I had hoped. One thing to point out is that he was 18 years old when he wrote it, so it's obviously not a masterpiece. It's not a fun and easy read like his other books, but it's still something new and original. I'd rather they publish more books like this than any on the bestseller lists.

PROS: 1) Jesus and his apostles in a Dawn of the Dead style world is a cool idea. 2) The blue women from Satan Burger have cameos in this book (they rule). 3) amazonian homosexuals 4) Lots of action, which is very uncommon in arty books 5) Great ending (makes the book worth finishing). 6) It is written in a very crazy writing style and experiments with language in new and unexpected ways. In one section he even stops writing in English and starts writing in a made up language that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Of course, you don't know what the heck is happening but I love the fact that he had the balls to do something so absurd.

CONS: 1) Messy plotting. 2) Too many characters. 3) The story sags in the middle. 4) the writing style might be strange, but not as interesting as in his newer books. 5) sometimes he goes a little too far trying to be weird. In one section, one of the characters actually takes a break from being a character in the novel and goes home to his wife to complain about his job as a character in a Carlton Mellick book. I don't know, it was just a little too much for me.

I gave the book 4 stars because I really like the author and think it was a good effort. But without knowing that the author was a teenager when he wrote this I would have given it 2 stars. If you have never read a Carlton Mellick III book than do not I repeat do NOT read this book first.

In a brief forward to this "anti-novel" (whatever that is supposed to mean, given that the structure of the book is hardly an antithesis of anything), the author expresses his belief that you, the reader, will hate it. Regardless of anything else you might say about him, at least Carlton Mellick III is truly a punk. Only a punker would consciously attempt to create something that everyone will hate.

Unfortunately, I was more bored with this book than anything else. The prose is either artfully inept or genuinely inept, and after a certain point I no longer had the patience to figure out if there was something--some Joycean sense of wordplay, perhaps--that I was simply missing out on, and was ready to simply call it awful. Whether it went over my head or not, Mellick's style is eventually very tiresome. The plot involves a re-framing of the story of Christ and the Apostles--hardly untrammeled ground--in some semi-apocalyptic future not long from now. Ho-hum. A prominent element is the existence of zombies straight out of "Night of the Living Dead" and every other movie or story with cannibalistic corpses that you've encountered before. Yawn. The characters are uniformly decadent, amoral and despicable. Been there, done that--such an approach can be interesting, but it isn't here.

Maybe I'm just more jaded than Mellick believes to be possible, but I didn't hate this book. I hated only the fact that I spent money on it, in anticipation of something truly subversive. This book isn't subversive, but merely scatological, and worth taking about as seriously as a 12-year-old boy writing obscenities on the bathroom wall. Naturally, devout Christians and anyone shocked by depictions of gratuitous violence, necrophilia and the like will react exactly the way Mellick seems to desire. Everyone else will be puzzled at best.

There is, of course, the possibility that I am simply missing the point; there are any number of critically acclaimed novels that I don't "get" any better than this one. But the point of a review is simply to communicate my own impressions, hopefully with enough detail to provide at least some information, even for those who might not agree. Good luck deciding if you agree or not.

[Addendum and fair notice: unlike the other reviewer currently on this site, I have actually read most of the book. I was unable, however, to muster the energy to finish it completely, although I skimmed through the parts I failed to read thoroughly. It didn't get any better.]