Whores for Gloria

This third novel by a writer billed as the next William Burroughs hammers the weary cliches of street life into a tinny portrait of a San Francisco barfly. Whores for Gloria features Jimmy, a Vietnam vet (that has no bearing on the story, except as a setup for a hallucination filched from Jacob’s Ladder) who wanders the Tenderloin district trying to preserve the memory of a prostitute named Gloria (whose allure is never explained) by visiting hookers who tell him their stories. When Vollmann finally tires of describing women getting their vaginas cut out and men puking up Night Train, he whistles Gloria in to blow Jimmy’s brains out. No telling why Gloria does this, but it has the virtue of bringing a tedious exercise in black leather raunch to an abrupt end. D