Overlay

For a while in the 70s, Barry Malzberg was on a roll. He produced a seemingly endless stream of short novels that explored a wide variety of themes and topics, but which were all written in essentially the same voice and about the same obsessions (sex, power, alienation, mental illness, paranoia and apocalypse). It was as if Woody Allen decided to become a hack pulp SF writer and lost his sense of humor in the process but picked up Philip K. Dick's gallows humor and dizzing sense of unreality as compensation. I liked all those books a great deal, bought them whenever I could find them on the stands and in the speciality book stores. I was quite sorry when he seemingly faded into obscurity after "Galaxies" and s few more. (It turns out that he was also writing under other pen names and in other genres, but I didn't know that at the time. Out of his prolific output from this period, my very favorites were "Galaxies", "Herovit's World" and this little gem, "Overlay". "Overlay" may be the only SF novel ever written about aliens conspiring to conquer mankind through the agency of horse track gamblers. In fact, I'd bet money on it. As odd as that sounds, the book itself is even odder - the narrator is an alien bureacrat who seems to have developed many of the same neuroses and obsessions of the gamblers he is trying to manipulate. What's more, this alien seems to be barely competent and in constant hot water with his superiors, which takes the novel out of space opera territory and makes more of a Joycean-voiced version of "Office Space'. Even that description can't do the book justice, because the real thrust of the book is the literary style the author adopts again and again in his books: an OCD litany of ranting and anger and bitter self mockery that is the equivalent of drinking cheap bourbon straight from the bottle. It burns all the way down and makes the world cheap, vivid and tawdry. There is so much concentrated anomie and angst in this short little book that it becomes almost an uplifting experience, and there are turns of phrase and flights of prose (especially the final "Prayer to Clocker Martin") so masterful that the jaw drops to contemplate it. In short, "Overlay" makes me want to kill myself, but in a way that is almost invigorating; it's a mental vacation from the drab boredom and realities of office work, traffic rush hour and evening television rituals. I'm still not sure, after all these years, exactly what Malzberg was so worked up about (and I hope he got some help for it if he really felt that way), but the sweep and energy of his style is still most invigorating. I can almost guarantee that unless you share his obsessions (which I used to), you won't like "Overlay". But still, this paperback has a place of honor on my bookshelf even 30 years after its publication.