Quake by Rudolph Wurlitzer

Quake Reviews

• 
  Jack Tripper

  
  
  1974 Bantam mass-market (149 pages). Thank you to Jordan West for the recommendation.
• 
  Michael

  When I picked this up, I thought it would be a smart, amusing social satire of Hollywood or Southern California culture, circa late-1960s, using an earthquake as the occasion for the satire.
  
  Instead, it's a grotesque, quite violent, and generally unamusing post-apocalyptic tale concerning the aftermath of a major quake in Los Angeles.
  
  We follow the moment-by-moment experiences of the narrator as he witnesses the city and people around him unravelling, and as he himself unravels (toward the end of the book, his dialogue is limited to "aaahhhs" and "ooohhhhhs," believe it or not).
  
  It's not a vague, hippy-dippy, dope-induced tale; it's actually written in a terse, hard-boiled style, that suits the story well. And Wurlitzer has a good grasp of that style.
  
  It definitely has a compressed intensity. It's brief and can easily be read in a short afternoon, which is good because anyway it's really a nightmare that you don't want to linger over.
• 
  Joachim Boaz

  Full review:
  https://sciencefictionruminations.com...
  
  "Rudolph Wurlitzer’s Quake (1972) parades the traumatized victims of a near-future earthquake through a lust-filled black comedy. Wurlitzer deftly re-purposes the language of erotica for distinctly un-pornographic ends: the aimlessness of life transmutes into a priapic shuffle towards [...]"
• 
  Andy

  One of the worst books I've ever read.
• 
  Andy

  Read about 40 pages and gave up. Seems like it was written in an all night dope haze, maybe I should have smoked a doobie first. Was expecting better from the guy behind Two-Lane Blacktop and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid films.
• 
  Gk

  This is a full-throttle, counterculture disaster novel set in post-earthquake California. I read it in a couple days, and loved every minute of it. Quake is by the author of NOG.
• 
  Mike

  Bloody psychotic nightmare diarrhea party. But not in a good way.
• 
  Rick

  Disturbing, disturbed book about society disintegrating
  in the aftermath of disaster, penned by the author
  of one of my favorite novels, "Nog."
• 
  Charlie

  Rudy Wurlitzer goes batshit insane and shows us how quickly the world (specifically the upper crust of the world) will become a Boschian hellscape as soon as the 'big one' hits. This is seriously one of the grossest and most depraved books out there, partially because there is so little going on beyond that depravity. Does that sound of interest to you? Pick this up and read it in a sitting or two; everyone else stay as far away as possible.
• 
  Roger Mexico

  Meh. Not super well-written. Kinda of exploitative/pornographic. Also, definitely the wrong time to read a book about an “end of the world” kind of event.
• 
  Paul Wood

  ~150 pages of poorly written chaos.
• 
  Steve Shilstone

  The Big Quake hits L.A. in the late 1960s. Apocalypse ensues. Unnamed narrator, ever in the moment, never reflecting, staggers through the horrors of civilization ripped away.
• 
  Nick LeBlanc

  This is a very visual and violent book. An unnamed and uncharacterized narrator wanders through a post-earthquake hellscape while society crumbles around him. But this was no average earthquake, it was the mythical "big one" that should be striking California at any moment now. There are scenes of graphic depravity and violence, and the narrator just stumbles through, his responses to said horrors gradually reduced to wordless "ooohs" and "unns." There are elements of Western here, some dashes of expressionism (in the vein of works like Naked Lunch), and some post-modern use of characterization and narrative development. Wurlitzer is a skilled writer, very clear, very evocative, and very efficient. My suspicion is that this novel was an allegorical prediction about the impending dissolution of society into chaos that many folks were feeling at the beginning of the 70s when this book was published. It's a good read but not for the faint of heart.
  -
  -
  tl;dr--Good read for folks craving a more "experimental" type of narrative, especially if you're just starting down that road. There's lots of anger and sadness in here, and if you're anything like me, sometimes that can be very cathartic to read.
• 
  Jeff

  this book is awesome. Maybe it should be at least four stars but it is out of print...so I'd be a school of one. "Quake" is a hippie Lord of the Flies. The opening has the main character (who remains nameless through the book) humping a chick during an after shock to the quake of the century just to avoid reality of the situation. Humping on a diving board as people drown in the pool and burn in the hotel.
• 
  Joe

  I can't help feeling that with more work and editing, that Quake could have been a 4 star book. Wurlitzer's meandering acid-trip style works really well in Nog, but not nearly as well in Quake. There are a lot of imaginative ideas and vivid imagery in Quake, but there is a lack of polish that left me unsatisfied. I also read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" pretty recently, which is a much more cohesive post-apocalyptic book that balances boldly imaginative ideas with a simple but strong narrative.
• 
  Paul

  Fun. Definitely suffers from that classic doesn't-really-give-a-fuck disaffected narrator, which I can't see how an author thinks he's going to get a reader to care if his narrator doesn't, but whatever. More of a piling-on of images that just ends where it ends versus a particular start-to-finish journey, which would have definitely made this book more enjoyable, given it a lot more purpose, buuuuut. Noiry, I guess.
• 
  Jamar Phillip

  It was a great book and I highly recommend it for other people.