SS SS ee ee SS a SE gE SEE NEO February 26, 2003 Tom Mellish Culture Section Editor: Kerry Evans Book Review | By moss€ OP Contributor The cover of DUJ—standing for Direct User Interface—has a wrap-around picture of a painting done by the Vancouver artist Corby Cuff. If a cover is any way to judge a book, this one is abstract, dark, and disturbing. I’ve shown the cover to a number of people, and it is something of a Rorschach inkblot test. Some peo- ple see a clear-cut, and others see two screaming heads. DUI is a small press affair, only a hundred copies, with nearly four hundred pages per book. With the title, I'm thinking “Driving Under the Influence’—that it has something to do with Socred Gordon Campbell at the wheel of the BC Government, decked out in a Hawaiian shirt and sloshed to the gills. Maybe it is about Gordo: the genre is “horror fiction.” The story is set in current day New Westminster, which is its strength throughout—the setting is clear and present. There is some history to do with the old capital of BC, namely the Penitentiary, but we are taken away into the fantasy world of Seline Colbourne, who exists, I’m assuming, in a state of disassociation. There, we visit Jerusalem, and Madrid, in some Rosicrucian/Templar romp of initiation. In his bio, it states that mossE grew up in New Westminster, dropped out of school, hung out at weird nightclubs, and got a couple of tattoos like a good sailor. In the press release for DUI, even mossE can’t recommend this book, saying, “Put it on your shelf, that would be good enough.” There is something disturbing around every corner, and even looking past all the spelling mis- takes, and grammar—disgusting and loathsome—without a Hollywood ending to make one even think that there’s hope. But I’m glad that he has done it. I cannot imagine what would happen submit_to_culture@yahoo.ca if he had not sewn this Frankenstein of fiction together. The author has an obvious dislike for New Westminster. For his characters, it is a place of bad memories, where nothing goes right, and there is hell to pay. Sexuality is stigmatized. Love is a four-let- ter word. Violence is everybody's comeuppance. Woven through this is a thread of fantasy, namely an ancient she-wolf who journeys through the book to eventually meet up with the main character to give an obviously plagiarized lecture about the opium trade of the British Empire. Throughout, one is confronted by the death toll fueled by the Drug War. You can’t turn a page, or meet a char- acter that hasn't been affected in some way by prohibition. There is a great body count, if you like that sort of thing: a high school shooting, assassination, random violence, and the premed- itated sort. There is also great detail paid to body modification: the priest who pierces his penis, and of course the horrific operations done at the mouth of the Pit. There is quite a lot of information tucked away in this novel—really evil stuff, that has been done, and might still be happening. The upshot of this read is disturbing. The kind of disturbing that I'd rather not know, but that I should know, such as crypto- eugenics. I think this author has something to say, but does not yet know how to say it. I hope that he will come to his senses and write something more uplifting. Too long in the place he’s chosen to write from could be harmful to the health. If, for some deranged reason, youre interested in a copy of this tale of our college's own home town, I believe Book Town on Columbia Street has a stack. Or, you could download it at . eee, Taek Bod 4 gs iy the other press