Wrath James White - His Pain

This is going to be a bad review. I don’t mean a review where I say the book isn’t very good (although there is a lot to criticise about it) - I mean that, as a book review, this review will not be of high quality, because I don't know why I liked His Pain. I’ll try and give you an idea of what this book is, and I’ll critique it as well as I can, but I just don't know what it is White does that makes this novel so strangely satisfying.

Let’s start with what I do know. His Pain is a 2014 novel from Deadite Press, one of the most recognisable publishers in extreme horror. It concerns Jason, a boy born with a singular neurological condition that causes his brain to interpret every sensation as pain. Every taste, touch, smell, or sound gets twisted into agony by the disorder, and Jason spends his youth in an opiate haze, zipped into a sensory-deprivation bag at night and huddled in a hermetically sealed room during the day, until a mysterious yogi arrives, claiming that he can teach people to tolerate any degree of suffering through meditation. Needless to say, all doesn’t go according to plan.

As in the last review, I’ll go into the things I didn’t like first. Number one is the prose - like in Skins, the writing is mediocre at best and verging on unreadable at worst. The most irritating thing - and this is something that pisses me off whenever I see it - is that White is never content to write “he/she screamed”. Instead, we get this:

    “Aaaaaaeeeiiii! Oh God! I Can’t take it! Aaaaaarrgh!”

That’s the first line of dialogue in the book. Admittedly the first scene is Jason’s birth, and this is the kind of thing people probably say during childbirth, but an artist’s job is to improve on reality, not report it verbatim. There is no reason at all to try to onomatopoeise every character’s screams. Fortunately, there isn’t too much of that, but when it does happen it takes me right out of the story.

    Secondly, when things kick off, it happens far too quickly. We get an involving build-up to the yogi’s first hints of success with Jason, but then as soon as he’s taught the boy to tolerate the sound of his voice it feels as though White got bored and decided to jump straight to the action. In the space of ten pages or so we go from Yogi Arjunda beginning to help Jason master his senses, to Arjunda hiring a prostitute for Jason (he needs to “show him what pleasure is,” apparently). Then, Jason flips out and bites the woman’s face off and his dad’s reaction is to strangle her to death. There’s no agonising over that decision by the way, no moral conflict, no scene where Edward has to convince himself to kill in order to cover up his son’s madness - he sees that Jason has mutilated a hooker and his automatic response is ‘well, obviously I have to kill her now’. Then Jason’s parents matter-of-factly dismember the corpse, like a version of Shallow Grave where everyone involved is a psychopath. The frustrating thing is that the scenario White has created is genuinely promising. The characters are reasonably well fleshed out, the story is building at a good pace without seeming forced, and then it’s like someone flipped a switch and suddenly he’s fisting his mum to death. That odd, unreal feeling continues throughout the novel; people don't act the way people act.

    Obviously, it’s fiction, you can’t expect it to be 100% “realistic”, but there are certain rules you can’t break. No matter what the story, no matter how fantastical or surreal you want to make it, the rules of human behaviour stay the same - or, if you want to change them, there has to be a solid framework for the characters’ behaviour. This book fails on that level. 

Still, despite all this, I couldn’t put the book down. There’s something Wrath James White does that keeps me reading, no matter how flawed the book is. And when I got to the end, I found myself feeling good. I had spent the entire book criticising it, making a list of things to slag it off for on my blog, but none of that mattered - I liked this book. There was something about it that scratched an itch I didn;t know I had. His Pain is pulp, and it has all the drawbacks of pulp, but it’s damn good pulp. 

So there you have it - I don’t know why I had a good time reading His Pain, but maybe you will.