Word: sams
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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CRIME The Man Hunt For Son of Sam Goes...
...thrill movies and crime pulps. But in New York, his existence is a chilling reality, terrifying hundreds of thousands of young women in and around the city, enraging public officials, and both fascinating and frustrating one of the nation's most sophisticated police forces. The elusive "Son of Sam," who skillfully wields a lethal .44-cal. Bulldog revolver, struck for the eighth time last week, slaying Stacy Moskowitz, 20, and blinding Robert Violante, also 20, as the two sat in a parked car at 2:35 a.m. and watched a full moon illuminate Brooklyn's Gravesend...
Stacy, a popular, outgoing young woman who worked as a secretary for a shoe firm in the Empire State Building, was Son of Sam's sixth murder victim. Robert, a polite, conservatively dressed fellow who had just applied for a construction job with Con Ed, was the seventh person to survive bullet wounds in the killer's yearlong series of attacks...
Coover's 534-page opus hangs-and strangles-on a premise that might have sustained a passable college skit. Uncle Sam and the Phantom (i.e., Communism) are engaged in a life-and-death struggle for control of the world. Sam was doing swell at the end of World War II, but it is now 1953, and the Phantom possesses, among other things, mainland China and the atomic bomb. The Rosenbergs, tried and found guilty of helping the enemy get the bomb, must be exorcised as spectacularly as possible so that the light from their electrocution can combat the Phantom...
...Coover handles the rather limited demands of this artless form with ease. Those who are amused by gross fantasy will find much to admire in The Public Burning: Supreme Court Justices slipping and sliding in a pile of elephant dung; an aspirant to the presidency being sodomized by Uncle Sam...