REVIEW: Black Cat Mojo

- By Zombie Rob

Currently, the delightful Mrs Zombie is a week overdue in producing our second son. My life is a maelstrom of fielding our 2 year-old, endless parks & duck feeding, watching Jurassic Park for the fourth time that day, working, shopping, cooking, tidying and, of course, being on the business end of so many relentless bollockings that I don’t think I’ve had a normal conversation in weeks. I need somewhere to go, somewhere to hide - I need to sequester myself in the mind of Adam Howe. I need BLACK CAT MOJO more than I need air….

This tempest of oddity is a curious place to choose to try and preserve one’s sanity, but there’s no place I’d rather be. As I approach page 2, I can feel my head begin decompression because Rummy Rumsfeld - tragically dissolute and diminutive erotic artiste (porn dwarf) - is having a FAR more difficult time than me. He’s got a problem in the form of an epic gambling debt to a terribly unpleasant leisure-suited gentleman and his ball-torching bear of a mate, but they’ve got a plan for ol’ Rummy that’s just so uncomfortably stupid i.e. dressing up as a child to distract a wealthy but hopeless paedo so they can have him right off. Rummy has been a little reluctant to get involved, but dangling his disproportionately massive knob over the waste-disposal has had a persuasive effect.

I’ve just discovered 2 Haribo sweeties stuck so stubbornly in my hair. I’ll have to cut them out and look like I’ve been in a house fire, but even I concede I’m having a better day than Rummy.

I proceed along the series of unfortunate events of Rummy’s day with ever-widening eyes as it just goes from bad to worse to kill-me-now and realise that I have been given a gift in BLACK CAT MOJO. It’s a collection of four stories of varying length and depth, but each brings something new; running the gamut from head-thrown-back-laugh-out-loud comedy through discomfort to the point of rising nausea to outright horror, and this even starts with the contents page and the titles. Have a glance at these, I guarantee they’ll give you pause:-

1) Of Badgers & Porn Dwarfs
2) Jesus In A Dog’s Ass
3) Frank, The Snake & The Snake
4) The Mad Butcher Of Plainfield’s Chariot Of Death

A title is meant to whet the appetite, to intrigue and hopefully entice the reader into proceeding, but these titles make me run, arms pin-wheeling, into the stories to devour each word with the snapping and tearing jaws of literary eagerness. The tone of each story is so utterly different to the previous one, you could be forgiven for thinking it was an assembly of authors, rather than one multi-faceted madman at the helm. This is in NO way to say Adam is a jack of all trades/master of none because he’s written each tale with such a deftness of stroke I simply can’t identify where his true strength lies, though his might is his story-telling, regardless of the yarn he’s spinning.

His arsenal of narrative ability is so spectacularly vast that he could make taking the bins out seem like it’s been written by David Lynch and directed by John Waters.

This skill is rare, but there’s something else about him, something elusive and precious, but I think I’ve got it. By the time I’d reached the end of BLACK CAT MOJO there was a burgeoning excitement blossoming in me, but I’d experienced this before when I saw Pulp Fiction for the first time. I’m not comparing BLACK CAT MOJO and Pulp Fiction for a moment, that would be “apples & oranges” absurd, but it made me FEEL the same as Pulp Fiction did. In the same way Tarantino simply wanted to tell me a story, and then presented it in the most skillful and masterful way he could, Adam Howe has done the same thing with his wonderful tales, the depth of his characters (which is remarkable considering the constraints of the short story), his commanding vocabulary and his constant ability to surprise. But again, this isn’t entirely it: At no time during the entire book did he ask for my approval. He didn’t slide in a wistful vampire, or mention Facebook, or reference Taylor Swift to try and appeal to a particular audience. There wasn’t a crime-fighting toff or a rumpled, cigar-smoking detective to get another pre-existing demographic on board. There’s no pandering, there’s no cynical self awareness, so consequently there’s nothing contrived about a single aspect of BLACK CAT MOJO. This may be Adam Howe’s purest strength.

He doesn’t care if there’s a specific genre I like, he doesn’t care what I expect, he doesn’t care about what I’m comfortable with or how I like to read. This doesn’t mean he writes with dogmatic & boorish arrogance, because he definitely does NOT. It’s just that he’s got something to delight, entertain, challenge and make me jump to my feet with an exultant “NO FUCKING WAY!!!“.

He’s got a story to tell me.