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Short, bloody, and sweet. If you enjoy your storytelling gory and nasty (and I mean that in a good way), then David C. Hayes’s Cherub will be right up your alley. Released through Bizarro Pulp Fiction, a publisher of, well, Bizarro fiction, Hayes’s work effectively encompasses the worlds of both splatter-punk and Bizarro fiction. Hayes, in my opinion, falls more in the Edward Lee and Ryan Harding side of the Venn diagram of Bizarro than Carlton Mellick III or Cameron Pierce.
If you’re unsure of what Bizarro fiction is all about, imagine a combination of early David Cronenberg (Shivers, Rabid) mixed with a generous sprinkling of goremeister Lucio Fulci and topped off with a Salvador Dali/Dada icing, and you’ll have a basic idea of what to expect. If you’re easily offended, stay away.
The book starts with a nicely executed birth scene, where Marie (Cherub’s mommy) pushes out her progeny. Cherub of the title is a hulking man-child, chained in his mother’s basement until his mother dies, falling down the stairs. Cherub, in order to survive, eats her remains. Yes, this is that kind of book.
After he’s found, Cherub is sent to The Blessed Arms Sanitarium, a state institution that the state seems to have abandoned. Once inside—and needing a mother-figure—Cherub is manipulated by the head nurse, Angie Fletcher (who makes Nurse Ratched a saint amongst women), to do her bidding. With Cherub under her sway, Angie rewards the giant with sexual favors. In return, he literally tears apart those who stand in her way. Hayes does not hold back on the graphic nature of these episodes, so be warned.
Soon, after having Cherub rip apart the head doctor, Nurse Fletcher rules the roost, opening up a meth lab, hiring some of her cronies, working the inmates on a production line, and using Cherub as her enforcer. However, her plans are waylaid when Cherub falls in love with Vena, another inmate, who attempts to find a connection with the violent giant and persuade him that his violent ways are not acceptable. Hayes excels in these moments, in which Cherub reaches for human connection, only to have a cruel world intervene. These moments of pathos are touching and are the heart of this violent novel.
Cherub is the violent product of his environment, a victim of abuse and a system that hides its casualties from the rest of the world. In Vena we have the hope of salvation and the potential for a compassionate connection—which may have come too late.
Evil characters are archetypes here, bordering on stereotypes. Nurse Fletcher, Leon, and Clint are no more than one-dimensional symbols for us to expend our rage upon as we cheer for their violent end. And that’s the point. However, within the blood and guts and graphic sexual abuse, Hayes is making a larger argument about institutions, the state of mental health, and how, as a society, we choose to deal with those in our care. The question becomes: who are the monsters here?
Or maybe he’s not asking the question. Maybe Hayes simply wants to gross us out. But I like to think that there’s a little more going on below the surface of this gory piece of exploitation. Horror—good horror—taps into truths about society and culture, and Hayes does this with Cherub, creating a piece of disturbing fiction that pokes at uncomfortable issues with a stick and begs us to react.
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