By BUDDY GIOVINAZZO (Severin; 2024)

A unique entry in Severin’s grindhouse novelization line: a 40-years-after-the-fact novelization of Buddy Giovinazzo’s notorious 1984 no-budgeter COMBAT SHOCK, written by the filmmaker himself.  That Giovinazzo is an accomplished wordsmith was showcased in his powerful 1993 collection LIFE IS HOT IN CRACKTOWN, which he made into a much lesser film in 2009.  With COMBAT SHOCK the transposition from one format to another is much smoother, resulting in a novel that outdoes its filmic inception in many aspects.

In relating the beyond-bleak account of Frankie Dunlan, a severely traumatized ‘Nam vet mired in a NYC hellscape amid junkies, killers and a deformed infant, Giovinazzo was freed from the budgetary restraints and bad acting that marred his film (about which even receptive viewers like myself have to be VERY forgiving).  He also heightened the grit factor considerably, all-but rubbing the reader’s nose in urban grunge via a host of supporting characters as doomed as Frankie.

There’s Mike the junkie, who’s seen in the film ripping open an arm wound with a coat hanger and pouring cocaine into it, an act Giovinazzo replicates in extremely detailed prose, as well as the even-more-hopeless Terry, who sells a kidney for drug money.  There’s also Mary, a homeless ex-nurse who has the misfortune to be robbed by a desperate Frankie, and Frankie’s wife Cathy, who’s far more fleshed out than she was onscreen, being a once vivacious and resourceful woman whose spirit has been worn down by poverty.

All this works due to the skilled and insightful prose, and an authoritative depiction of street life that’s rivalled only by the late Hubert Selby, Jr.  COMBAT SHOCK’s urban milieu is one Giovinazzo (who currently resides in Germany) clearly knows inside and out, and it proves a disturbingly appropriate setting for the splatterpunk excesses of the final pages, in which Frankie is driven over the edge entirely (resulting in descriptions like “blood gushed between his fingers before he landed with a wet slap on the concrete” and “He fired into her chest and a chunk of flesh splattered the wall and stuck there”).

Flaws?  The sniggeringly ironic chapter headings—“All Work and No Play,” “Afternoon Delight,” “Home Sweet Home,” etc.—are an annoyance, and I’ll also lodge a complaint about Giovinazzo’s steadfast refusal to grant his characters any hint of optimism.  Even Mr. Selby, pitiless though his fiction was, offered the possibility of redemption, something that’s completely nonexistent in COMBAT SHOCK.