Michael Slade – Headhunter (W. H. Allen, 1984, hc, 480 pages, this edition Onyx (NAL), 1986, 423 pages)
Michael Slade‘s
Headhunter and the other novels of the ever changing writing team assembled by Canadian lawyer Jay Clarke has been often mentioned in the Vault. It is nearly 40 years since the novel was first published, and a re-read and a re-evaluation was long overdue.
Is it still readable? So many novels of this era have aged badly, due to changing times, taste and the rosy look of nostalgia. No doubt there are a lot of problems here which are not the fault of the book. How entertaining can the hunt for a serial killer be after watching hundreds of tv crime shows and movies about serial killers not to mention countless novels in the meantime? What about the genre of the forensic crime solvers and profilers which left its impression in the general public?
While Headhunter and its successors were held in high regard as horror novels, they were basically police procedurals. Doubtless most of the plot wouldn‘t work in todays‘ world. No DNA, CCTV and Cell phones in 80s Vancouver.
Still it is often astonishing how much Slade had his finger on the pulse of its era. (Though I doubt that a major publisher would do this book today). The 2 pages of reference material – a rarity in this kind of fiction - are not for show. It is fun to check the – for some readers overwhelming – flood of facts and trivia, which is one of the fundaments of the rambling narrative. It was a bit like a drinking game, but Big Brother‘s search-engine proved every random checked supposed fact which is important to the story or not.
Kind of a surprise was that
Headhunter is more restrained than the OTT
Ghoul and
Ripper, which took the energy of this start to a new level. Considering the development of the series which I dutifully bought but never read in later years it is more understandable that this element kind of died in the later books or was much more reined in. It just couldn‘t be sustained.
It is still an entertaining novel, even if the descent into the darker aspects of pop-culture hell and the things it absorbed like Jack the Ripper and horror fiction of the next books is largely absent. Here is only a touch of Voodoo, shrunken heads and damaged killers. Sure, some parts do not add up, especially if you try to put everything that happened or was told in a linear order at the end. But the twist is still great and surprising. To be honest, Slade pulls here a lot of stunts one wouldn't be so forgivable if other writers would do it. But it still is this kind of book.
Headhunter proves to be a kepper if you like this kind of writing.
There is a new version out there called
Headhunter Reimagined from 2016. Basically this is the same book with rewritten – not censored, just differently told -, chapters shuffled, shortened or embellished with newly written material. It is a strange experience. While some parts are clearer and establish connections which are told in the original only hundreds of pages later, they kind of also lack the former intensity. It is kind of bizarre. I would recommend the original, warts and all.
The rest of Slade will follow.
