GOD IS A BULLET

A small-town cop teams up with a former member of a southern California Satan-worshiping cult who helps him take back his kidnaped daughter. Quietly upright police officer Bob Hightower is shocked to his boots when he makes a friendly Christmas-morning visit to the desert home of his ex-wife and her husband. Not only have both been murdered, but the family dogs are stuffed head-first into the toilet; their horse has been mutilated; and Hightower’s 14-year-old daughter Gabi is missing. We’re told that Bob’s superior, the sleazy Captain John Lee Bacon, knows not only why the killings occurred, but also enjoys a special relationship with sadistic monster Cyrus, the Manson-like leader of half a dozen tattooed, pierced, and drug-crazed psychopaths who call themselves the Cult of the Left-Handed Path. Bacon discourages Hightower from running down leads—and Hightower persists, digging up Case Hardin, a former Left-Hander trying to kick her heroin habit in an East L.A. shelter for abused women. Hardin, like just about everyone else in this overblown blood-splatterer, clogs her crude soliloquies about evil and social complacency with obscenities and rock-—n—-roll lyrics. Still, she eventually helps Hightower to find Cyrus. Along the way, Hightower, a semi-devout Christian, has to pass some pretty gruesome rites of passage, get himself tattooed, and cultivate his bloodlust—a sight savored by motor-mouth Cyrus. He finally discovers that Cyrus supplies drugs, sex, and the occasional murder-for-hire to Bacon and others. Absconding with funds from a brutal robbery, Hightower and Case offer to swap swag for Gabi, inciting a flame-lit shoot-out. Ludicrously bad prose (a salt flat is “laid barren as if it were the hub of a nuclear holocaust or that Devonian moment when the earth was catapulted out of mystery and all was flung aside”). And as for the plotting . . . when it isn’t awful bloody, it’s bloody awful. (First printing of 75,000)