Robin Marx's Writing Repository

This review originally appeared on Goodreads on June 25, 2022.

Junkyard Leopard

By Oliver Brackenbury – Brackenbooks – November 26, 2018

Review by Robin Marx

This violent tale tells the story of Mary, an awkward and lonely girl who works scrapping cars at a junkyard. By night she dresses in a faceless leopard print costume, murdering the corrupt and venal capitalists of the city’s financial district by the dozens. Where Mary is insecure and shy, her alter ego The Figure is driven and fearless. While Mary navigates daily life as a member of the working poor, even falling in love along the way, The Figure works to hunt down Gerald Byrne, a ruthless financier who barely survived a previous attack.

Despite the Amazon categorization, there’s nothing particularly comedic about the book. It felt like splatterpunk-lite to me; there’s moments of extremely graphic violence, but it always felt like the author took a step back before going full splatterpunk and really reveling in the gore. The tech level seemed about five years or so more advanced than our own, adding some subtle cyberpunk overtones, but urban horror seems the most natural home for the novel.

Tonally, the book reminded me a bit of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but the book feels borne out of an Elder Millennial author’s tremendous frustration and disappointment with the current state of the world. The social contract has been broken. Working hard is no longer a guarantee of a comfortable and secure life, and traditional paths to success like university education and full-time careers are increasingly unattainable. The middle class is shrinking, and everyday we suffer a constant media barrage of suffering and fear. Late stage capitalism is abusive and unsustainable.

And rather than just attributing it to some vague societal malaise, it’s often quite easy to identify the specific companies, executives, and politicians that are taking an active hand in increasing the misery of the world so as to enrich themselves to ever more obscene levels. We know who these people are. And this book offers the cathartic fantasy of being able to take direct action and strike back at our tormentors. To make them feel the same desperation and insecurity they inflict on so many. To fuck up some billionaires with a customized claw hammer.

This is a brisk read. The sympathetic characters are well-rendered, and Mary’s romance subplot is handled in a charming and relatable way. The antagonists, on the other hand, tend towards caricature. They’re irredeemable comic book villains. Certain sections of the book are written from their perspectives, but they’re not leavened with any kind of sympathetic traits. I chalked this up to them being more symbols than characters. Elsewhere in the book Brackenbury demonstrates he can handle nuance, with the antagonists he chooses not to.

Recommended for fans of Fight Club and The Punisher.

★★★★☆

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