The Wet Forever

Clark fills his first novel with all manner of degradation--sadism, murder, excrement, prostitution, drug abuse, masochism--and often combines them to create yet more varied perversions. Unfortunately, there is no character development and no focus on what the depravity does to its practitioners--except the ultimate death of the four main characters. The plot itself is straightforward. Janus MacPherson, a small-time grifter, tries to sell a videotape of a U.S. senator having sadistic anal sex with an 18-year-old. The buyer, Stroh, tries a deadly double-cross. Soon Janus, Stroh, Stroh's brother and Madchen, a dominatrix-for-hire who serves as Janus's soul-mate and S & M partner, are in a murderous spiral. Violence is ubiquitous--Janus, an albino, hits a street bum who teases him. Janus's sole thought afterward is that his father, an army man to whom ``violence was a sacred thing,'' wouldn't have hit a mere bum. The finale is set in Germany, where the author makes obvious but pointless allusions to the atrocities of WW II. As it is, however, the unrelenting depravity is not only far from sacred, it even loses its shock value. (Aug.)