Stephen Schneck: The Nightclerk

The latest addition to my website is Stephen Schneck‘s The Nightclerk, a very funny and somewhat over the top cult novel, long since out of print, about a very fat man – he weighs at least 600 pounds – called J Spenser Blight who is the night clerk at the Travelers Hotel in San Francisco. The hotel caters for transients, would-be suicides, those looking for a place for hidden and often casual sex and party-goers. All are presided over by this enormous man, who hears voices, who is married to a very wealthy woman, who was sexually abused as a child and then pimped by Blight. When they are caught in their activities, Blight escapes to the Travelers but his wife does not. Blight is one of the great fat men of literature – at times gruff, at other sympathetic and thoughtful, spending his time listening to his voices, reading trashy erotic novels and cutting pictures out of magazines, while all and sundry pass through his hotel.