THE AT-YOUR-BECK FELICITY CONVEYOR

A grocer takes his revenge on a rapacious young shoplifter in Landon’s lewd, satirical novel.

Justyce Dreadmiller, the self-made owner-manager of the boutique grocery store Mildred’s Market, has long suffered the routine shoplifting of “pouting young nymphet” Yvette Cartier. Every few days, the entitled, beautiful Yvette pilfers several high-end items—perfumes, cosmetics, lubricants, and the like—from Justyce’s shelves. Justyce has just purchased a Japanese-made novelty conveyor belt (the eponymous At-Your-Beck Felicity Conveyor) to help set the Market apart, a substantial investment that makes Yvette’s shoplifting increasingly hard on his bottom line. When Yvette purloins $700 worth of inventory in a single day, he knows he must do something to put her in her place. Justyce believes in “solving his own problems in his own ways, on his own initiative, and at his own convenience, in as straightforward a manner as was practicable,” an approach that has, in the past, meant leaving his high school bully drugged and castrated in a swamp. For Yvette, the plan is slightly less grisly: He will simply humiliate her in the most sadistic manner imaginable. For that, he will need, among other things, the help of his seductive son, an aphrodisiacal ointment that delays climax, and a few novel augmentations of the At-Your-Beck Felicity Conveyor. Landon’s prose is nearly Joycean in its verbosity, which, in addition to slowing down the novel’s pace, creates an ironic friction with the ribald subject matter. Here, the author describes Yvette’s magnetic effect on men: “Gentlemen from all walks of life would ogle our subdebutante everywhither she set her pretty young feet and, to boost her libidinal ego, she would play little games with these poor sitting ducks by coyly making goo-goo eyes at the throbbing love muscles inside their trousers.” The book builds to a preposterous (and literal) climax—aided by what amounts to a Rube Goldberg machine composed of sex toys—that is almost too abstracted to either scintillate or offend. Readers who enjoy both high postmodernism and BDSM will have fun with this one.

A dense, sometimes-surreal novel with a de Sadean sense of humor.