Peekaboo Bosh

By Ben Richards.

John King, Peekaboo Bosh (London Books, 2025)

Peekaboo Bosh. It’s an unusual title conjuring up the game adults play with children, hiding their faces before revealing a smile but in this instance accompanied by the almost comedic expostulation of satisfaction at a blow delivered. And it is an appropriate title because this is an unusual novella. It contains much that is familiar for those who read John King – including the welcome return of an old friend from previous work – but it is taken to a new level in terms of both narrative themes and style. Subterfuge, multiple identities, masking, and violence run beneath the surface of a narrative which bristles with ideas and stylistic devices. There is playfulness but it comes with a punch.

The book is dedicated to those who “risk their lives, their liberty, and their sanity in the defence of non-human animals” and it is perhaps the last of these sacrifices that most exercises King in this short but important work. In a system that imposes the “eternal Treblinka” conjured up by Isaac Bashevis Singer and to which King nods, staying sane is a difficult and lonely task which even the sociability of collective resistance cannot always assuage. Mental collapse is a recurrent theme, and King extends this exploration to the perpetrators of the horrors as well as those who protest them. The backdrop to moral turmoil is public indifference and – sometimes worse – rank hypocrisy. Many of those who can shed tears for the suffering of an individual animal on the internet will do so with a burger in hand and it is this pervasive societal akrasia that has the greatest capacity to inflame the nerves of the sensitive and compassionate – a group to which King most certainly belongs.

Peekaboo Bosh is a kind of follow-on from King’s great novel Slaughterhouse Prayer only this time he has turned his attention from industrial farming and the mass slaughter and cruelty it entails to the vivisection labs where experiments are conducted supposedly under humane conditions for our benefit. The plot itself is simple – a group of activists plan a raid on a lab run by a sadistic monster called Simon Spinks who is planning some kind of commercial deal with a pair of shady outsiders linked to China. Underlying all of this is a plot twist which I will not reveal but which is teased throughout and which changes the course of the story completely, especially for Doc Spinks, the villain of the piece and by far the most important character.

As is often the case in King’s work, a number of characters (perhaps too many sometimes) are introduced only to fade from view or to remain intermittent ficelles delivering an indirect guide to the minor delights and bugbears that the author is keen to bring to our attention. Cliff, for example, serves to exemplify the importance of walking for cardiac health and anxiety. Beth brings a lemon-drizzle cake to a meeting which allows Mickey Moo to speculate on the difficulty of finding a good one especially as he refuses to buy “the ultra-thin slices sold for silly money in London’s coffee shops”. One gets the feeling that King would be happy to spend more time expanding his list of dos and don’ts – I half-expected manbags, digital music, or biometric screening to receive the major-general treatment – but there are bigger themes to deal with, and King comes at them with a familiar energy and multiple angles of attack.

The real focus of the story is Simon Spinks, a character who bears some resemblance to Jonathan Jeffreys, the sadistic elitist monster from another earlier King novel, White Trash. Behind his pleasant, calm and seemingly rational demeanour lurks a dangerous torturer spoiled (a loaded term) by a weird upbringing with “Mother”. He is a seething mass of compulsions, scatological obsessions, and perhaps most interestingly a fear and horror at the fact that he too is an animal despite the perverse ontological barriers he erects in his mind. I was reminded while reading Spinks (and the excellent short story “Roadblock 2am” which accompanies the novella) of La Llamada, a recent work by the Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero who studied a female survivor from the Argentine Naval Mechanics School (EMSA) which was used as a torture and execution centre during the “Dirty War”. Those who ran it were killers, torturers and rapists but they also – like Spinks – enjoyed “playing God”. They could indulge whims, they could select a handful of survivors and “mascot” favourites on an entirely arbitrary basis, they could even be polite when they wanted to. But they sent almost all the young victims snatched from the streets to horrible deaths being drugged and thrown alive from planes into the sea at night. They allowed women to give birth before removing the children for trade and then despatching the mothers on these death flights as there was no further use for them. It is precisely THIS kind of abhorrent and repulsive behaviour that King protests, and he is quick to draw the link between our abuse of non-human animals and, for example, sexual crimes against children. Simon Spinks (I suspect his initials may be no coincidence given that King normally has fun with names) may be a heightened creation but there have been many who have carried out similar atrocities in the history of our species.

In the case of Argentina, there were trials and many of the genocidal perpetrators are in prison. But the horrors against non-human animals are an ongoing global conveyor belt of suffering to which there seems no end and which threatens the sanity of those who resist it. This is best exemplified by Mickey Moo, the main protagonist of Slaughterhouse Prayer who has moved on from his one-man campaign of retribution to join the peaceful anti-vivisectionists. But he still carries a knife, which he manages to conceal even from the most sharp-eyed among them. One suspects the violence might be an ebb tide that could still easily turn and that he still isn’t always a relaxing person to be around with or without shop-bought lemon drizzle cake.

Mickey inhabits a world where both insanity and the theme of violence, the question of how justice can or will be delivered, is ever present. In the end, King as a writer can afford to play a different kind of God and he does so intriguingly and inventively with a familiar religious dichotomy. There are always heavens and hells in King’s imaginative world and it won’t be too much of a spoiler to say that Simon Spinks is definitely heading for the latter after a sequence of explosive narrative fragmentation that breaks down his most important barriers and forces him to live with his true identity as simply a member of the simiiforme infraorder, squatting maddened by his own excrement, among the rest of the animals he has so despised and brutalised.

King explores the territory between resistance, despair and insanity unsentimentally and does not offer easy answers. What comfort there is can be found in a refreshing residual humour, the pleasures of human company, and the balms of music, plant-based foods, and books. While I have teased him gently for his finger-wagging tendencies, it is a venial matter that does not break his fundamental friendship with the reader. Despite his subject matter, King is not at all depressing to read and he is always keen to find consolations among the madness, to take an interest in the oases of a life that involves so much torment. There is a kind of innocent eccentricity to him at times which makes the books both sympathetic and highly readable. Meanwhile, King’s stubborn focus on the theme of our cruelty towards animals is his own act of resistance. He knows it won’t change the world, but the only other options are silence and complicity or worse a kind of cynical playing along. In a world in which the green ghetto of privilege that is the publishing industry continues to serve up a relentless diet of boring, conformist, solipisolipsistsist dross, any new work by this singular and deeply moral writer is a cause for celebration.