American author Mark SaFranko’s fiction isn’t for the faint of heart, nor is it recommended for the hypersensitive. His brand of realism – confessional, cynical, true to the grit and spit of life lived on the margins – will not be to everyone’s taste.

Certainly it owes something to the pared-down style, contrariness and depiction of poor, dysfunctional Americans that typifies Charles Bukowski’s work; and one would guess that Jim Thompson – particularly his masterly anatomy of the depraved mind, The Killer Inside Me – also figures as an influence (though Thompson, whose cynicism is more absolute than Bukowski’s or SaFranko’s, still feels like the more subversive artist). It’s not surprising then, given this, that although SaFranko has an enthusiastic and vocal following, his work isn’t more widely read and heralded in North America (ballsy British micro-press Murder Slim publishes his books) with its cultural partiality for the smoothly asphalted middle of the road. One gets the feeling that will change soon enough. Authentic writing, however slowly, always finds an authentic audience.

In a larger context, SaFranko’s first-person narratives, particularly his two brilliant “Max Zajack” novels, Hating Olivia and Lounge Lizard, likely find their earliest antecedents in the rambling, unnamed narrator of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (often called the first existentialist novel, and the antecedent to several generations of not always readable, rambling, first-person narratives). And like Bukowski and Thompson, he also shares something with – and it isn’t a stretch to mention him in this company – such expansive writers as Knut Hamsun (Hunger), Céline (Journey to the End of the Night) and Henry Miller (Sexus and Tropic of Capricorn), admired for their unfiltered honesty and a certain anti-aesthetic or raw approach to their storytelling. That being said, SaFranko’s prose, though blunt and unadorned, is superbly crafted and moves with cinematic velocity toward its bleak (but often comic) conclusions.

Max Zajack, the first-person protagonist of both books, and ostensibly SaFranko’s literary alter ego, is a restless, furious paragon of that two-headed monster, alienation and artistic ambition, bouncing frenetically between lust, obsession, violence and a seething compulsion to write. SaFranko has acknowledged a huge debt to Miller and Bukowski in creating the Zajack character. In Miller’s Sexus and Tropic of Cancer, and Bukowski’s Women, we encounter would-be writers who while doggedly and hungrily pursuing their art indulge in a feverish, at times savage, carnality. It would be easy to dismiss Max Zajack as an utterly amoral character with few if any redeeming qualities – the same could be said of the sociopathic cop Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me. But to suggest for a moment these characters aren’t interesting, compelling, funny and truly wonderful fictional creations, is just wrong.

HATING OLIVIA
Mark SaFranko
Murder Slim Press
205 pages
$20.00

Hating Olivia charts Zajack’s obsessive relationship with a woman – as unstable and toxic as him – named Olivia Aphrodite. Weeks after meeting Olivia the passion disintegrates into madness and betrayal. And sexual obsession, or sexual madness, works as the obvious narrative engine for this story, one that hooks you from the beginning and doesn’t let up for a moment.

But it would be a mistake to characterize Hating Olivia as a novel strictly about sexual obsession. Ultimately, it’s the story of Max Zajack, a man cursed with the obsession to become a writer at all costs (not unlike the steadfast SaFranko himself, an ultimate survivor when it comes to pursuing one’s art) who has the misfortune of falling in love with the antithesis of a nurturing Muse. As Zajack concludes near the end of the book: “They say a real love story never ends. But the truth is that given enough time, love will usually morph into its opposite — repulsion, hatred— indifference. What do you think the world´s problem is? It´s the exhaustion bred by familiarity and tedium, the transience of romance. You see it every single day in the dead eyes of the men and women on the street. And yet that´s the way life itself has been built— everything is going to die. Even you and me. There´s nothing that can be done about it. Call it God´s joke on us....”

Hating Olivia’s sequel, Lounge Lizard, continues the saga of Max Zajack. This time he’s not obsessing over one woman but screwing everything that moves. It’s 1980s New York at the height of the Reagan era, Zajack has settled into a deadening job with a big telecommunications company, the only release from which is a series of passionless one-night stands with Manhattan club chicks. Mercilessly (and perhaps joylessly) following the demands of his penis and gratifying a sudden hedonistic bent, Zajack goes to town, fucking and partying like a rock star. But the result, far from being titillating or pleasingly pornographic, is disturbing and authentic. As with Hating Olivia, it’s the prose, simple, perfect, magnetic and at times almost assaultively real, that makes Lounge Lizard tick.

“The string of her tampon was hanging out. I wrapped it around my middle finger and gave it a tug, then jumped off the bed and fetched the waste can. There was a soggy bump when it bounced off the metal.

The idea of fucking that bloody slit was incredibly erotic. But instead of climbing straight on, I dropped down and buried my mug in her thatch. The hot liquid spread all over my face.

‘Your face is a bloody mess,’ she gasped when I came up. She was still talking when I rammed it in and started bucking.”

Murder Slim Press deserves high praise for having the temerity and vision to publish this overlooked American master. It’s shocking and somewhat sad that a large American publisher (or even an “underground” one) hasn’t taken him on. I don’t know what these people are reading or thinking these days. Sure, SaFranko’s work is not for everyone. Chances are if you dislike Bukowski or Henry Miller and the such you’ll not warm up to SaFranko’s dark and turbulent creations. Then again, if you’re a true reader, with an open mind, an eye for well-crafted prose, and you want a change of pace from the gluey word porridge you’ve been scarfing lately, you can’t go wrong with Hating Olivia, Lounge Lizard, or any of SaFranko’s work.

LOUNGE LIZARD
Mark SaFranko
Murder Slim Press
198 pages
$20.00

For further queries: www.murderslim.com

Salvatore Difalco is, among many things, senior writer for TORO and the author of Black Rabbit & Other Stories.