![]() ![]() ![]() “Every assault or raid our task force ever made was figured out in advance…What we’re talking about now is ten times easier.” In the diary of Malone which records the pinpointing of security gaps and the mapping out of the logistics of the abduction, Sharon Fields is always refered to as The Object. “I was an assistant to our platoon leader, infantry, in Vietnam,” says Shiveley during a discussion of the plan. They implement the kidnapping as if it were a heist or an assault on a castle. ![]() Together they form The Fan Club, a group whose objective is to kidnap Fields, and afterwards persuade her to have sex with them. Malone is a writer, Shiveley is a mechanic and ex-soldier, Leo Brunner a tweedy accountant, and Howard Yost an ex-football player who now sells insurance. “A good stiff eight inches did more to promote social justice than all the big brains in the world.” “The greatest leveller on earth, the greatest equality maker in the world, was a man’s cock,” are the thoughts of Kyle Shiveley, the most brutal of the four. They see her as an idol, but also wish to reduce her to something less. This book, however, goes beyond abstract polite ideas to brutal reality. The men are enraptured by this woman but they also have contempt for her, and here we have the two obvious poles of celebrity culture. I was lucky enough to hear about the book in The Projection Booth‘s excellent podcat about Caligula ( “Episode 178: Caligula”) 1, and when I looked up the synopsis, I couldn’t believe it was real but it’s very, very real. The Fan Club takes the idea of celebrity worship to its shocking, obvious end. Wallace’s book teaches us yet again how popular art, a pulpy sensational novel, can touch a subject with a razor where others use soft down. Yes, it shocked me, made me realize you were something special, a work of art, a temple, an object meant to be worshipped from afar, a rare embodiment of Eve held aloft to inspire all men.” In Irving Wallace’s The Fan Club, Sharon Fields is the biggest star in the world, and Adam Malone is one of a group of four men who kidnap the actress so they can have sex with her. “Then, seeing you in the movie, seeing you where you belonged, seeing you in your proper frame again, well, it shocked me. I had demeaned you by treating you as an ordinary woman,” says Adam Malone to Sharon Fields. I had forgotten who you were and where you belonged. “I had removed you from the frame of your special existence. “This is the game that moves as you play” “Charisma dazzles, and flashbulbs woo the lightning bolt.” “Love is merely a madness and, I tell you, deserves a dark house and a whip as madmen do: and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love, too.” Though it is does not appear so at the moment, it will eventually return to the material of “The Last Magazine by Michael Hastings: Gawking at the Wreckage”, with this post serving as a kind of sequel to that one. The empty subheads will eventually have content. It is my ardent hope that it will be completed by Monday, March 9th. It is currently unfinished, and ends abruptly. This post, like many others, was intended as a short book review and grew into an epic that will end up touching at least two continents. IRVING WALLACE’S THE FAN CLUB: THE FAPPENING ![]()
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