Review: "Throat Sprockets" by Tim Lucas

Throat Sprockets, to date the only original novel from famed film critic Tim Lucas, is a horror novel that seemingly has no equals, at least within its genre. It feels like a story of “quiet horror” from A Ramsey Campbell or Charles L. Grant, but it is too clinical in its structure (while still being filled with dread). It feels like a form of erotica, but the eroticism at the heart of this book is anything but that. It is within this struggle to try and define it (and the book’s resistance to definition) that the book achieves monumental levels of greatness. It feels refreshing and original even though it is nearly 20 years old. So refreshing and original it that it is almost offense and threatens to turn off readers who do not submit to its nightmarish worldview and dive headfirst into this strange and deeply metaphorical novel of obsession and the horror of loneliness. The book is a dense read even at the relatively slim length of 232 pages, but it is packed to the gills with every minute detail, every turn of phrase being important and integral to the book’s theme and quality. It is a book that is obsessed with film, with Lucas’s main claim to fame being the gargantuan biography on Italian filmmaker Mario Bava (which, if you want to get now would cost as much as a house mortgage). So for a book obsessed with cinema, it is no surprise that it opens in a movie theater. But not just any movie theater, you see.  Our unnamed protagonist and jaded ad executive finds himself at the beginning frequenting a local porno theater in his hometown, ironically named Friendship, Ohio. It is in this theater that he discovers the film of the books’ title: a fetish film where the point of eroticism is a woman’s neck (the bridge between the head and the heart, if you will). This experience with this film, the details of which are kept appropriately vague throughout the book, becomes an obsession for the unnamed narrator, an obsession that destroys his marriage but revitalizes his career. But as his career grows and takes him across the country, the influence of the film grows beyond his own private perversions and into the world at large. A few books have tried, but this is the one of even fewer books that I feel accurately describes a waking nightmare, and in its dreariness reminded me a little bit of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness. It works as a good metaphor for the kind of obsession, one that really comes with any creative endeavor, that always tends to separate one from the rest of their life: it gives them a higher sense of meaning, but like the narrator of this book, it takes them away, characterized by a startling scene near the end taking place in a hospital and the perfect final page. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. I guarantee that you have not read anything quite like this.

Rating: 5/5