Synopsis:
Harriet Laurel notices the odour the moment she steps inside Mercy House, brought to the retirement home against her will by her son and his wife. In the early stages of dementia, Harriet has grown to resent her daughter-in-law for not providing grandchildren. Yet as she crosses the threshold, she notices her mind begins to sharpen. Then her hate begins to grow. . . Arnold Piper, an eighty-five-year old ex-Marine, has always prided himself on self-reliance. But betrayed by his own body, he’s learning that surviving war-torn Korea was easier than facing the daily indignities of old age. And his worst trials are still to come. Sarah Campbell, an idealistic nurse, is already stretched thin at the chronically understaffed Mercy House. Now her duties are about to take a terrifying turn. Can she survive the night. . . and her patients?
Review:
Old school, Adam Cesare’s “Mercy House,” a 2015 reissue, is a contained apocalypse, transforming a care home into a bloody killzone. An uncomfortable, gory, gloriously excessive time, “Mercy House,” is absolutely an over the top, sweaty, vile coagulation of dislocated limbs, grand guignol deaths and unconventional orgies. It also, however, examines the underfunding of care, ancient equipment and subpar vetting, and exploits fears the reader may have about aging, whilst also making a point about how we become increasingly inclined to look past people as they age and their bodies begin to betray them. Does such analysis require the volume of bodily fluids this novel is dripping with? No, that’s just for fun. For fans of Brian Keene and Nick Cutter, for those who like a little ick and ichor, this filthy pearl-clutcher is definitely worth a read now it’s (ironically) getting a new lease on life from Del Rey and the phenomenal Black Crow Books- out October 20th.
Something is seriously amiss at Mercy House. Korean war-vet Arnie Piper managed to take himself to the bathroom unassisted, long-unconscious Greta Samson bolts upright, and all of the elderly residents report a strange, sweet smell that the staff can’t get a whiff of. It’s profoundly bad timing for Don and Nikki Laurel that things are changing at the home the day that they drop off Don’s always difficult mother Harriet, now suffering with Pick’s disease. It’s during their welcome dinner with chairwoman Gail Donner, that all hell breaks loose at Mercy House, the residents, Harriet included, transforming into blood-thirsty, sex-crazed and grotesquely-altered monsters.
As far as… transformations go, Cesare’s here is gnarly, bringing to mind the likes of the rabid infected in CJ Leede’s “American Rapture,” and Clay McLeod Chapman’s “Wake Up and Open Your Eyes.” Perhaps, in this respect “Mercy House,” even borders on the lewd, but eventually, the resident’s changed behaviours become perversely fascinating. I am unsure as to whether I want to call Harriet and Arnie and co. zombies, but if they are, then they’re not the braindead Romero-esque automatons, retaining some intelligence, old habits and personality. For example, the war-vets, with Arnold at their helm, band together, gather resources, and do what they know to do. Beatrice Kent, or ‘Queen Bea,’ whose affinity for Mercy House’s male residents was well-known, is the key player when social boundaries disintegrate completely. Those are passages I shall have to scour from my brain. Anyway, in this respect, exclusive groups and party lines, mob rule, factions and hierarchies, “Mercy House,” almost reads as an apocalyptic novel, or certainly the characters behave similarly, McCammon’s “Army of Excellence,” and Randal Flagg’s feverish zealots springing to mind.
As compelling as those tribal dynamics are, the bulk of the commentary concerns aging, Cesare’s portrayal of which is unflinching. Completely unabstract, age in “Mercy House,” does not mean a gentle fading of the light, but frailty, medication, incontinence, losing your mobility, or your memory, or both, along with your privacy and perhaps pride. It is raw material horror, and written in 2015, “Mercy House,” feels ahead of its time in confronting that- ‘cronesploitation,’ a relatively new phenomenon from my perspective. It’s perhaps a mean joke then that these residents, whose families (possibly) and carers (mostly) are so concerned for, the old, infirm and forgotten, become such causes for concern- putting the younguns trapped in the home through quite the ordeal and turning the dynamics of dependency upside down.
An unashamedly vulgar and depraved survival story, the unpleasantries of which are compressed into 24 unhinged hours, Adam Cesare’s “Mercy House,” is quite understandably not the novel for everybody, but it certainly was for me. Philip Fracassi’s “The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre,” subverted and dialled up to 100, this completely fucking disgusting, care-home-bound apocalypse is beyond taste and beyond great.
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