I first realized that Sam McPheeters was a great writer when I read his incredible profile of former Crucifucks frontman Doc Dart, an acutely observed and devastating piece of writing that reads like "Frank Sinatra has a Cold" for the punks. At one point not long ago, I remember wondering aloud to a friend when he was going to publish a book.
It's tough to talk about McPheeters without talking about his musical career (much to his chagrin, no doubt). Full disclosure: I am something of a diehard fan. When I was in college, I actually attempted to write a profile of McPheeters for a journalism class when I discovered that he lived in nearby Claremont. While very polite in responding to my inquiries, Sam clearly had no interest whatsoever in being profiled--although I did manage to badger him into answering a handful of questions. (I felt a thrill of vindication when he responded with some enthusiasm to a query about which Presidential Libraries he had visited, as I had long detected a certain fascination with the presidency in his output, which also recurs in The Loom of Ruin.) McPheeters is probably best known as the singer for Born Against, the quintessential political punk band of the '90s--but his greatest work is with Men's Recovery Project, who I rank alongside Devo as premier satirists of the boundless stupidity of modern man. When I heard McPheeters had written a novel about a furious gas station owner who threatens to destroy civilization, I was frankly ecstatic.
I see The Loom of Ruin as a continuation of the aesthetic evinced by Men's Recovery Project, who chronicled the absurdity of the commonplace. MRP scrutinized the barren landscape of modern life, unmasking the surreal, nightmarish qualities of quotidian activities like working in an office and sending email. The emblematic Men's Recovery Project song is "Normal Man", where the banal title proclamation--"that's right, I'm a normal man"--is delivered with the slobbery desperation of someone who recognizes that "normal" is nothing of the sort. It's one of MRP's many thumbnail sketches of the grotesques haunting our dystopian present, figures that include the Sexual Pervert ("The world is his napkin / Sitting quietly on the bus / No one knows it's him"), the Egyptian Assassin ("It's a gross, lonely life"), and the Rude Scientist ("his theories have been rebuked and his articles refused").
Trang Yang, the central figure of The Loom of Ruin, is the most striking grotesque in the McPheeters oeuvre: a violent, pathologically furious Hmong gas station owner, whose limitless rage suggests a combination of Mel Gibson, Virginia Tech gunman Seung Hui-Cho, and Michael Douglas' "D-Fens" character from the film Falling Down. But The Loom of Ruin is a novel about the cosmic cruelty of coincidence, and Yang's rage is explained to be the result of brain damage suffered after being struck with a stray round from an LAPD firefight. Before the shooting, we are told, Yang had plans to build an enormous Hmong community center. Afterwards, he plots the murder of the LA Lakers with a machete.
One of the best qualities of The Loom of Ruin is how expertly McPheeters evokes the setting of Los Angeles, a natural playground for his brand of surrealism if ever there was one. At the same time, McPheeters' depiction of the city evokes the interchangeability of the metropolis, in a world where all interactions are mediated by a vast corporate matrix composed of entities like Chevron, Safeway, Apple, and Time Warner. Through his total rejection of society, Yang represents that most classic of American archetypes: the rogue, operating beyond the bounds of legality and even common sense, inscrutable and indigestible to all observers, serving no master.
But true escape from the web of global capitalism is impossible, both in The Loom of Ruin and in real life; Yang is still, after all, a Chevron franchise owner. Appropriately, nearly every character in the book is depicted as a bundle of private anxieties buffeted by vast, impersonal forces they can't begin to understand. One of the most impressive writerly feats of The Loom of Ruin is how McPheeters juggles the novel's large cast, which features dozens of characters ranging from a pair of dimwitted ironic racists to Barack Obama to Satan, with each one progressing the ominous plot and remaining (mostly) distinctive. That said, one also can't help but wonder if the real reason McPheeters added Satan to the roster is simply in order to work in a Black Sabbath quotation in the novel's final stretch. But the method by which the devil is summoned is an inspired and appropriately prosaic piece of urban mythography: a character accidentally runs an empty microwave for two minutes.
But all of the characters are essentially reduced to props the second Trang Yang enters the scene; he is a figure of such raw, hateful energy that he crashes through the book's brief chapters like a wrecking ball. Yang is more a force of nature than anything else; he is more akin to a mythological demon or a cruel demigod than a human being. He's nothing less than the glowering unconscious of late capitalism, a seething, embodied death wish that wants nothing more than to burn it all down.
In the end, that's what The Loom of Ruin is: it's a jet black comedy about man's ruin. We love our apocalypses, but our favorites tend to be those where we can imagine ourselves surviving and even flourishing; dramatic reversals of fortune that give meaning to the meaningless and deliver us from the grueling monotony of an existence defined by mindless consumption. (The reigning example, is of course, a world overrun by zombies--where we can literally rise above the drudgery of our everyday lives.) But the annihilation wrought in The Loom of Ruin is of a very different kind: haphazard, undignified, inscrutable. It's a kind of kitchen sink apocalypse, where rather than being transformed into rugged survivalists, we watch humanity blown to pieces at the absolute nadir of its dignity, fighting over an Applebee's gift card. In The Loom of Ruin's ultimate flourish, man is laid low not by his Promethean hubris but by his sheer laziness, auto-corrected into oblivion.
