Saturday night in sleepy ultraconservative Salton, Oregon has turned terrifying. For thirteen weeks a killer has struck and a young woman has been viciously murdered. With all-American gumption and a lack of concern of legal niceties, the town has taken things into its own hands and formed the Town Security Brigade. Sure enough, the good-old-boy vigilantes seem to have scared the psychokiller away -- until reporter Anna Wimple shows up asking questions about the Brigade's rough justice. Anna becomes victim number fourteen -- or does she? No one is going to find out because the Brigade covers up her death.

As the power of the Brigade grows, only two of Salton's residents seem to have the courage to stand against them. Tony -- 18 years-old, precocious, bright, anti-authoritarian -- and Sonja, his beautiful 25-year-old high school principal. As they uncover the truth, they mark themselves for death. Sonja is abducted and Tony -- with the help of doper mechanic Hustle Brodyboy -- must find her.

In this 1981 paperback original, John Shirley quickly sets up the scenario of a community putting power into the wrong hands and far outside of legal boundaries. Although he continues to paint -- often with sly raillery -- a damning portrait of redneck mentality complete with misogyny, racism, and homophobia, once the basic premise and the obvious identity of the psychokiller are established, the plot heads slam-bang into thriller territory. But with unique Shirley style. A boy confined to a mental hospital relives over-and-over the murder of his twin sister with whom he was incestuously in love. ("With his right hand he opened her up in spiral pattern, as if using a can opener, methodically zeroing in on her groin, where he let the knife dig and twist.") With wry dark humor, a wounded man trapped in a well discourses with a frog that becomes a meal. Poisoned and crippled by a gangrenous leg, obsessed with righteous vengeance the frog-eater emerges as a "mad-thing" -- certainly not supernatural, but with the appearance and symbolism of such. (Foraging for food he sees a duck: "...shifted to his left leg, poised, scarcely breathing, licking his lips... lurking one-legged like a misshapen, predatory pink flamingo.")

The book culminates in Sonja's desperate encounter with the Saturday Night Killer (all the more frightening for her knowledge of his techniques and regressive schizophrenia.) It ends with a particularly vile end for the bad guy and with Tony and Sonja's heroism made oddly hollow by circumstances. But this futility allows them a future they could not otherwise have.

Oddly enough, twenty years later the two most "shocking" aspects of THE BRIGADE are neither the political commentary or the violence but that an educator in a position of authority would consider a sexual relationship with a student (albeit one of legal age) and incestuous consensual sex between twins. American society has always condemned -- at least superficially and within the context of the times -- mob-based extra-legality and blatant discrimination, but, in the post-AIDS era, has again turned puritanical concerning "illicit" sex.