The novel Boot Up the Divan, Daddy's Coming Home was the debut novel of celebrated straight white male author Brian D.F. Hendrickson. It tells the story of a destitute family whose father is getting out of prison after murdering three neighborhood families at a block party after an argument about the Vietnam War. It is a classic.
Pieter, the man who allegedly murdered the three families and served seven years in prison before making parole, vowed upon his release to murder the other two families who had defied him and continued to claim that the Vietnam War was wrong. When he returns to his family, he is interviewed outside the home by television news cameras and tells them all that he will murder the other two families within a fortnight. Ah, the dramatic tension begins.
Pieter begins his righteous revenge by catching and basically flaying the pet cat of one of the neighbor families, the Herman family. He flays their cat and nails it to the front of their house all splayed out and such. He films this and puts in on the Internets for people to look at. As a result, he is picked up by three cops who bring him into the station house for an interview. In the interview room, the cops begin cracking open and drinking cans of beer as they take turns forcing our hero Pieter to take it up the bum from them. They ridicule him for being a straight white man and then drive him home, throwing a full can of beer at his head as he's walking in the house.
Pieter is really pissed now. He's been violated in the worst way and he has no recourse. The cops threatened to have him thrown back in prison on a parole violation if he reports what happened or takes any steps to get them into trouble. He's in a pickle, so he turns his attention back to his plans to take revenge on his liberalism-infected neighbors.
Because his wife has a funny smelling vagina, Pieter sleeps on the divan in the front hall of the house. He is woken in the wee hours by sounds of a disturbance outside the house. He goes out there to find toilet paper all over his trees and bushes and the words "SWM GO BACK TO WESTERN EUROPE" spray painted on the front of his house. Tensions are escalating. This is a good book for children to read. It shows them how the world really works without dumbing it down at all.
As an aside, I will say that Brian D.F. Hendrickson really addresses a problem in America today. A straight white man pretty much knows that he is going to get some cop's dick shoved up his ass every time he is brought down to the police station. Do we complain? No, we just take it. We are conditioned to take it and it needs to stop.
Pieter is now hypervigilant and very jumpy. He has acquired some chemicals that he plans to pour into the water supply of the Masons, who are the other family that has offended him. These noxious chemicals chew a person to death from the inside out. Very nasty stuff. Pieter has to be careful not to get any on his hands. So he fashions leather sacks out of the skin of a farm pig he slaughters and patiently tans and puts those over his hands as he pours the chemicals into the Mason family water supply. He then watches with glee as they each come running out of the house with their insides on fire and then explode while screaming. He has successfully defended the objectives and motives for the Vietnam War. But there is still the matter of the Herman family. He wants to put them through a special kind of hell.
Pieter is picked up again by the cops the next morning and questioned about the horrifying deaths of the entire Mason family. Knowing what will happen anyway, Pieter bends over and takes it from the cops again, who release him because they cannot find sufficient reason to hold him any longer.
He decides to throw suspicion off himself by coming into the police station again the next day. This time he brings a story of how he heard the Herman family murdered the Mason family. Much to his surprise, when he enters the station, he sees the cops doing the whole butt thing with Mr. Herman, right out in the open while other cops cheer. He writes down the story he made up to tell the cops and leaves it on someone's desk and goes home.
What an absolutely horrifying world we live in.
Pieter buys an axe at Home Depot and proceeds to kill the entire Herman family with it. He then cuts them up into chunks and rents a boat that he takes out into the harbor near the popular local beach. There he throws the chunks into the water all throughout the harbor and beach area. This attracts a shitload of sharks, who proceed to bite and eat people trying to have a nice time with their families at the beach.
And so, Pieter's vengeance is complete and he goes back to Home Depot to get some things because, when he was there buying the axe, he saw some items that made him believe he was capable of building his own deck. So, he gets what he needs and starts building that deck and pretty much fucks it up and has to call his cousin, who is a building contractor, to fix his fuck ups and complete the deck.
Really a four star book on the Behr Relativity Scale. There was a lot of stuff in this book that I thought was disrespectful and over the top, but that might just be me getting on in years.