LITERAL REMAINS

In 1880 a riverboat captain is delivering a shipment to the Jewish town of Lowensport.  His Jewish Czech crew of two discover they are carrying barrels of clay from their native Czechoslovakia.  They kill the captain, an earthquake hits, the river is rerouted, and the boat is swallowed by the mud and lost.

Before that happens though, the Conner clan of Somner’s Cover (I think) is fighting with the prosperous Jews of Lowensport.  Gavriel Lowen, leader of the Jewish settlers, owns the sawmill and is raking the bucks.  Conner and his men hatch a plan to kill Lowen and the other Jews.  They do; they blow Lowen up in his own sawmill.  But then something kills Conner and every other man, woman, and child in Somner’s Cove.

Jump to the present and successful game designer Seth Kohn and his freakishly smart girlfriend Judy move to Lowensport.  They are fresh from rehab; he is a recovering alcoholic, she is a former crack addict.  They have bought the house that once belonged to Gavriel Lowen.  They meet the rabbi Asher Lowen from Lowensport and his weird wife, and the other strange citizens.  State workers find the buried riverboat on Seth’s land, so he gets to keep the barrels of clay.  He stores them in the basement, naturally, and soon discovers a secret room in the basement containing ritualistic items and decayed human remains.

Now there are also two crooked cops, Rosh and Stein, from Somner’s Cover who use two crooks, D-Man and Nutjob, to handle some hits for them.  The cops are drug dealers and get their product from D-Man and Nutjob who get it from Mr. Mysterious, who is eventually revealed to be Asher Lowen.  It seems the Jews form Lowensport are the bad, black magic, kind of Jews and they also make crack.  Now this comes in handy when they want the skull of Asher’s great-great-great-grandfather Gavriel that is buried in Seth and Judy’s dirt floor basement.

Oh, and the bad guys use a golem to kill people.

Somehow all these things tie together, but most of these people are needless within the story.  The Golem isn’t that good, but I suggest you read the last half of the story when the bad guys get Judy hooked on crack again by forcing her to smoke it.  The entire book is filled with atrocious, unintenionally funny, dialogue throughout, but it’s when Judy starts sucking the glass dick again that we are given winners such as the following lines:

Sooner or later he’ll know I’ve got something more than a cold.

I’ll get it all out of my system while he’s gone….I’ll crack it up, then quit when he comes home.

“I’m not going to smoke crack.”

Middle-aged crackheads die from sudden heart attacks and strokes all the time.

“I need more crack!”

The Golem needs more crack, cowbell, thought, or something.

1 out of 5
the_novacula