Dr. Adder by K. W. Jeter

Sometimes, when the existential ennui of Orange County seems all too overwhelming, I repeat to myself as a mantra: Philip K. Dick lived here. Forget conapts; Irvine is a city where a single corporation controls 95% of the residential, business, and retail real estate (the remaining 5% is available for 99-year-lease). Grass is “under renovation.” The toll roads stomp all over southern California’s natural beauty, then have the gall to direct drivers to RelieveTraffic.org – as if paying them $10 to drive to work were your civic duty. Arrested Development and The O.C. both milked our neuroses for several seasons worth of entertainment. Richard M. Nixon was born here.

It’s a messed-up, dehumanizing place, and it’s no wonder that Philip K. Dick wrote the stories he did – he only had to look outside.

Dr. Adder, by Dick protégé K. W. Jeter, continues his tradition of Southern California dystopia. Written in 1972 – but unpublished for over a decade, due to its controversial subject matter – Dr. Adder is shockingly ahead of its time, utterly foreshadowing the dystopian cyberspace of Gibson’s Neuromancer. It also grapples with the idea that media oversaturation inevitably leads to increasingly disturbing sexual psychoses head on – the same material that Cronenberg explored in Videodrome. Jeter’s first novel, Dr. Adder is raw, unfiltered, and frankly unpleasant stuff – perhaps the reason that the novel has fallen into sub-cult status, despite its prescient content and historical significance to the genre.

The protagonist of the book is E. Allen Limmit, a corporate chicken farmer from the Arizona enclave sticks, who arrives at the “Interface” between Los Angeles and Orange County with a mysterious package. But the star of the book is the eponymous Adder, the drug-addled black market surgeon whose shadow falls over everything that transpires. Adder has risen to power by mutilating and deforming the bodies of the city’s prostitutes – the better to satisfy the increasingly twisted desires of their johns. Though horrific in its grisly detail, this, too, seems eerily prescient; as the Internet has made “ordinary” pornography ubiquitous, content has become more and more graphic to get itself noticed. There are two sorts of memes, the interesting and the awful, and human beings willingly propagate both.

Too reprehensible to be an anti-hero, too clinically detached to be a villain, Adder simply is. He and his grisly trade are part of the landscape of the Interface, an almost inevitable product of his time and place. Refusing to judge, the book instead presents Adder as an amoral opportunist who saw a market niche and worked to fill it. In other words, Adder is the quintessential Orange County resident. All that’s missing is a sign proclaiming his willing victims’ bodies “under renovation.”