Waiting Period FROM THE PUBLISHER
In this moral tale, a man pulls back from the brink of suicide when his application to buy a gun with which to shoot himself is delayed by an unexpected computer glitch. Forced to wait until the error is cleared, he begins to rethink his position and eventually decides that, instead of violently throwing his life away, he will dedicate his time and effort to disposing of all those he feels deserve to die. Targeting a bureaucrat in the Veterans' Adminstration to start with, he devises an ingenious method of murdering him without a trace. His plan a terrifying and vengeful success, the man embarks on a joyful killing spree with a renewed zest for living, having found the true purpose of his existence. But whose is the other voice? The one that comments so wisely and so compassionately, and with such evident approval, upon everything the man does? Waiting Period may not offer any answers to the meaning of life, but it certainly poses a lot of interesting new questions.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Selby's latest offers a chilling look into the mind of a killer, as the author of Last Exit to Brooklyn uses stream-of-consciousness first-person narration to slowly transform his anonymous male narrator from a paranoid, disaffected war veteran into a deranged murderer. The catalytic event that initiates the transformation is the narrator's attempt to purchase a gun to commit suicide, but when a brief waiting period ensues, he decides instead to get even with his various tormentors. The first target is the bureaucrat at the Veterans Administration who has been denying the narrator his benefits, an alleged injustice he remedies by slipping the man a lethal dose of E. coli bacteria. The narrator goes through a brief period of killer's remorse, during which he almost confesses to a newsstand operator, but once his jitters pass, he targets a local TV celebrity for another dose of lethal bacteria. From there he goes completely over the edge, building a homemade crossbow as he explores the feasibility of using explosives to facilitate similar attacks in various cities around the country. Selby's style is relentless, harrowing and frighteningly effective, albeit somewhat monotonous and tough to read; this might have been a better novel if Selby had introduced some secondary characters and broken up the first-person narrative into chapters built around each incident. Still, in a world in which the reach of terrorism seems to grow on a daily basis, this story is a disturbing reminder of how vulnerable we are to attacks from the discontented and deranged, regardless of their location or nationality. (July 30) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Here, Selby (Last Exit to Brooklyn, Requiem for a Dream) again documents obsession, this time that of a disgruntled veteran who stops short of suicide after being faced with a five-day waiting period on his handgun order. In this time, he decides that rather than sacrificing himself he will validate his existence by killing those he deems despicable. Armed with Internet-given E. Coli recipes and pipe bomb instructions, he sets out to eliminate, among others, his boss at the Veterans Administration and Big Jim Kinsley, a Southern racist wrongfully acquitted in the murder of two black doctors. Like Requiem, Waiting Period shows Selby's deftness at employing innovative punctuation and creative spelling in service to his particular narrative voice. Except for random interjections from God, this novel is narrated entirely in stream-of-consciousness first person. Since the novel's voice belongs to a somewhat whiny and paranoid murderer, it does get exhausting after a while, and some lines seem too crafted to spout spontaneously from the brain of a homicidal maniac, albeit a sensitive one. In addition, as only one perspective is presented in this novel, it lacks the lively intermingling of different voices and the seamless transitions between them that Selby exhibits so well in his other work. However, the narrative can be appreciated for its schizophrenic word association games and the narrator's ideas on checking out of the status quo. Fans of vernacular wordsmiths like Irvine Welsh and of Selby's earlier work will want to take a look. Julia LoFaso, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A near-unreadable rant from Selby (best known for Last Exit to Brooklyn, 1964) about an anonymous loser who fails to commit suicide and goes on a killing spree to make up for it. Selby's failing this time out isn't his trademark grossness (The Willow Tree, 1998, etc.) as simply self-indulgence. The narrator is an obviously demented character who sounds like Henry Miller on amphetamines ("Country of idiots. It's not a moral degeneration. A case of becoming amoral. Immorality is tangible. It is a tangible perception of life and the actions needed to beat life at its own game. It is not fuzzy feelgoody. Fundamentalists have a very definite agenda they pursue and it is tangible. Concrete. The boob tube softens the suckers up for them") and seems to have no one to talk to. He decides to kill himself, but the gunsmith he tries to buy a revolver from is unable to waive the waiting period and he goes home empty-handed. Too bad, too, because instead of getting himself permanently and quickly out of the way, he begins to think things through and concludes that the world would not be better off without him-it's the other guys who need to be eased off the scene. So he begins to murder enemies of humanity, beginning by poisoning Mr. Barnard, the bureaucrat at the Veteran's Administration who denied his claim for benefits. Then Jim Kinsey bites the dust-the man who killed two black doctors in the 1960s and was set free by an all-white jury. Still very much in evidence, he's the guest of honor at an annual barbecue ("Freedom Day") celebrating his release. There are some goombahs in Little Italy who get bumped off also, but the reader is unlikely to last long enough to care very much about them or therest of this silly mess. Tedious, pretentious, awful.
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