Bunch! by David R. Bunch

I have the good fortune to own a copy of this rare, out-of-print collection of thirty-two dark, offbeat short stories by David R. Bunch, an author who despised smooth, slick, shallow, gadget-crazed 1950s American society.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out why Mr. Bunch's writing did not attract a wide readership during his lifetime and why his books have not been reprinted: too acerbic, too heady, too morbid and much too weird for even many avid fans of weird fiction and New Wave science fiction. As the author states directly: “I’m not in the business primarily to describe or explain or entertain. I’m here to make the reader think, even if I have to bash his teeth out, break his legs, grind him up, beat him down, and totally chastise him for the terrible and tinsel and almost wholly bad world we allow.”

After reading this collection, I feel a bit beat up myself, although my bones and fingers are working well enough to share the following comments on this batch of Bunch:

In The College of Acceptable Death the narrator/instructor opens his lecture with a string of demonstrations, beginning with the slicing up of copies of dachshunds nose-first through a baloney slicer. He moves on to having a copy of an oil-soaked man walk into a furnace, his body exploding in flames, all the while screaming in agony (the furnace is made of glass so students will not be deprived of any of the grizzly details). Following a number of other in-your-face demos, the instructor goes on to say these terrors are not part of death but part of your own thoughts in your own life here and now. Then, as a grand finale, the students directly participate in a classroom ritual decidedly more grotesque and bizarre. Ah, college, David R. Bunch-style.

With In the Time of Disposal of Infants, garbage collectors scoop up all those unwanted, less than acceptable, grimy parts of life that detract from the happy, antiseptic, perfect family world of the 1950s, as per the below illustration. Atop the list of what's to be collected for the rubbish heap and taken away - unwanted infants and old people.



In one tale a roomful of success-driven cigar chomping workaholics addicted to speed and greed gladly step on a conveyor belt so they can have the ultimate experience of rapid-fire moneymaking– to be whammowhooshed; in another, the narrator robs graves so he can kick heads around in his apartment as if they were volleyballs; and in yet another, two old guys who hate the younger generation watch as a mysterious sky-train lures all the town’s children aboard and returns to its home planet. Later that evening, those two oldsters are down in a cellar, wondering if the other guy is a spy for the aliens.

The author no doubt had a repugnance for the conventional, well-worn, persuasive language of billboards, magazine ads, television commercials and news coverage in the home of the brave – all formulated to sell the American way of life. Of course, Bunch wrote in his native tongue but he devised his own rhythms in writing sentences that combine straightforward, accessible Midwestern English with the quirky and dense. Here’s the way In the Complaints Service begins: “I’m not a pleasure-crowded man with a feel-suit, lounging back in one of those big-deal bubble-dome homes soaking up sensations. I’m a Servicer. Been in some phase of the Complaints Service for about forty years, and proud of it too.”

The narrator goes on to explain what the Complaints Service actually does: “Complaints Service, in short, is what our modern pleasure-loving people require to complete their kicks in modern living by, pardon the expression, kicking about what they think is lacking in modern life. And when we get a complaint about a pleasure lack we just send out a crew and a machine to fix things up.”

You may ask: How is this done? He goes on to tell us about a recent job where he lives and works – “out here in Brave New Hap – the happiest, most modern, the most complete country in the world.” The job runs something as follows: a husband and wife are upset at one another. The Complaints crew rushes out with their latest equipment to instantly turn upset into happy happy pleasure time. The equipment does its job and the crew leaves as the couple retreats to the bedroom for a round of intimate titillation.

Scratch the surface and we have a tale of secret police using force to ensure American citizens strictly adhere to entertainment and pleasure, force that shares much in common with the ruthlessness of the Gestapo eliminating opposition to the Nazis within Germany. I also detect hints of Philip K. Dick’s mid-1960s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the Mood Organ, a machine where a user can set the dial for anything from stimulant or tranquilizer to a state of sexual bliss.

Both DRB and PKD anticipate the extensive use of drugs in our modern world to control behavior, for example giving children Ritalin who suffer from attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD).
I suspect many readers of my review will not be able to put their hands on a copy of this long out-of-print collection. However, there is good news: David R. Bunch’s other collection of stories, Moderan, will be republished by New York Review Books in August. David R. Bunch – an author with a unique voice and a unique vision. I highly recommend making his book part of your personal library.