The Midnight Examiner by William Kotzwinkle

Eras have zeitgeists - some artistic works are more purely of their time than others. That doesn't mean they necessarily get outdated more quickly when the zeitgeist shifts, but they embody the world they were made in, and have to be seen in that context.

I don't know if William Kotzwinkle works in that mode more often than most writers - I've only read a few of his books. But The Fan Man is a book that could only have come out of the early '70s, all congealed counterculture and past-its-sell-by-date enthusiasm. And The Bear Went Over the Mountain is from a completely different era twenty years later, a satire of quintessentially '90s go-go capitalism and the "what's next?" school of publishing.

So I came to 1989's The Midnight Examiner - thirty-some years late, obviously - somewhat expecting it would be more 1980s than other books.

I was not disappointed.

This is a loose, short, oddball novel about the employees of Chameleon Publications, a New York-based publisher of all kinds of low-end magazines for readers who are not overly thoughtful or intelligent. The title publication is a weekly newspaper, along the lines of that era's National Enquirer or Weekly World News, but most of what Chameleon does is narrowcast to very specific audiences: Young Nurse Romance, Brides Tell All, Beauty Secrets, Real Detective. And it's employees are similar odd and quirky: we see them all through the viewpoint of the editor in chief, Howard Halliday, who edits things as disparate as Macho Man (which sounds something like Soldier of Fortune, only far more for wannabes) and the very softcore Knockers and Bottoms (which airbrushes scanty underwear onto its nude photos in anticipation of a potential swing to the puritanical in society).

The front half of the novel is mostly a tour of this world, and an examination of all of the Chameleon oddballs - there are a number of them, and they are all quite odd. It's fun and full of quirky details and amusing moments, but the reader may wonder if there's any substantial plot coming. That hits in the back half of the novel.

To simplify substantially, there's a model, Mitzi Mouse, who poses for a lot of photos for these magazines, and also does some porn for a local mafioso. She gets into an altercation with the mafioso and flees to the protection of Chameleon, whose editorial staff are more comprehensively - though very, very weirdly - armed than you would expect. The initial attack is thwarted, and those goons deposited with a local voodoo queen - she advertises in Chameleon publications - to be reprogrammed and set free. But the mafioso then kidnaps Mitzi and one of the female Chameleon editors - the very one Howard has been trying to get to date him - and so the whole staff gathers, with the aid of a kleptomaniac Egyptian cabbie and his electronics-device fence preteen daughter, to assault the mafioso's palatial Long Island home. This leads to a long infiltrating-the-enemy-headquarters section, with shocking reversals, threats of and actual acts of violence, lots of running about and sneaking through oversized air ducts, and so forth, before coming to an appropriately magazine-ish and happy ending.

A lot of Midnight Examiner is too much; that's the point. The names are silly, the action is weird, the whole thing is a cartoon. Kotzwinkle is not going for psychological realism at any point in this novel: this is a novel version of the overheated stories from tabloids like the ones Chameleon publishes.

You might have needed to be there - to see this kind of publication, to live in a world where these sort of half-baked ideas came out regularly on newsstands rather than hitting you in face with random little on-line pop-ups - to really appreciate Midnight Examiner. It's about and set entirely in a media landscape that's inescapably gone, where there was good money - well, at least money - from hacking out generic goofy ideas to a specific audience over and over again for as long as you could stand it.

But, if you know where it's going and can appreciate the vibe, Midnight Examiner is a nice slab of very 80s wacky fun, silly names and all. Kotzwinkle's writing is amusing and zippy throughout; he doesn't exactly take it all seriously but he does play it straight. This is the story he's telling here, and he's going to tell it the way it deserves.