A.J.’s Annual Party

A.J.’s Annual Party is a spectacle of excess that breaks into a riot, revealing how quickly Interzone’s performances of status and control give way to violence and grotesque bodily disorder. A.J. answers an assault on his guests and guards not by restoring ordinary order but by escalating the performance: cutlass, pirate song, hog-call, and a thousand rutting Eskimos transform the party into a shambles. Hassan finally banishes him, leaving the host’s authority exposed as both theatrical and precarious.

The Party and Its Performers

The episode is introduced under the emphatic title “A.J.’S ANNUAL PARTY,” which gives the gathering the shape of a recurring social ritual before its disorder overwhelms that form. A.J. turns to his guests and announces the Great Slashtubitch, an internationally known impresario of blue movies and short-wave television. A sixty-foot red velvet curtain is struck by lightning and torn open to reveal the enormous, immobile impresario in evening dress, a blue cape and monocle. The grand staging makes the party a show within the show: titles, costumes, curtain, and a commanded audience all promise a carefully controlled display. Slashtubitch’s persona is itself built around judgment and spectacle. His immense grey eyes are said to be unbearable to all but the Coordinate Factualist; when he is angered, the force of his displeasure can blow his monocle across the room. He berates actors for counterfeit orgasms and shoddy tricks, insisting on sincerity, art, and devotion while listing devices such as dubbed gasps, rubber turds, milk hidden in the ear, and Yohimbine smuggled in from the wings. The party’s extravagant presentation thus arrives with a parody of artistic standards: authenticity is loudly demanded in a world where performance, bodily manipulation, and deception are already part of the entertainment.

The Assault and A.J.’s Counterattack

The party’s breakdown is announced by Hassan’s accusation that A.J. has ruined the celebration. A.J. replies with an insult that calls Hassan a liquefying gook, bringing their political antagonism into the room as personal abuse. Almost at once, a horde of lust-mad American women rushes in from farms, dude ranches, factories, brothels, country clubs, penthouses, suburbs, motels, yachts, and cocktail bars. Their entrance collapses the distinctions the guest list and the elaborate staging had seemed to preserve: women in riding clothes, ski togs, evening dresses, jeans, tea gowns, slacks, bathing suits, and kimonos converge on the guests, clawing at the hanged boys and shouting demands for sex. The guests flee through the room, dodging among the bodies and overturning iron lungs. A.J. orders his Sweitzers to protect him, but his secretary, Mr. Hyslop, looks up from a comic book to report that they have already liquefied. That answer punctures the idea of a dependable guard force: the defenders have vanished into the very process of bodily absorption associated with liquefaction. A.J. responds by declaring that their backs are to the wall and their bodies at stake, then orders Hyslop to issue short arms. The mock-military language converts a party crisis into a siege, though the scale and tone of the scene make its declarations as theatrical as the curtain that introduced the entertainment. A.J. draws a cutlass and decapitates the American women while singing a pirate song. Surrounded and fighting overwhelming odds, he throws back his head and makes a hog-call. A thousand rutting Eskimos immediately pour into the room, grunting and squealing, and fall upon the women. The narration attributes their swollen faces and purple lips to a seasonal rutting period during which the tribes gather for orgies. The sudden arrival turns A.J.’s call into an impossible-looking instrument of escalation: instead of ending the assault, his intervention brings a second, still larger force into the already crowded room.

The Shambles and the Expulsion

Hyslop reacts with bored resignation, waving the Jolly Roger listlessly as he observes that A.J. is at it again. A house dick sticks his head through the wall to ask whether there is a menagerie in the room. Hassan, meanwhile, wrings his hands and condemns the scene as a filthy shambles. The contrast is precise: Hyslop treats the violence as a recurrence, the house dick tries to name it through ordinary institutional language, and Hassan speaks as the host whose party has ceased to be governable. A.J. ends the spectacle not as a defeated guest but as a pirate tableau. He sits on a sea chest with a parrot on his shoulder, an eyepatch over one eye, and a tankard of rum in his hand, scanning the horizon through a huge brass telescope. Hassan calls him a cheap Factualist and orders him never to darken the rumpus room again. The banishment is the episode’s decisive consequence: A.J.’s performance has overwhelmed the gathering so completely that Hassan can reassert his authority only by casting him out.

Political and Formal Significance

The party’s comic violence is inseparable from the novel’s larger presentation of Interzone as a place where political labels, public events, and bodily transformations cross into one another. Hassan’s accusation and A.J.’s retaliatory insult frame the disorder as a clash between a liquefactionist and a self-identified Factualist, but the scene supplies no orderly political debate. Instead, the ideological conflict takes the form of vanished guards, a cutlass, an improvised battle speech, and a fantastical invasion. A.J.’s own identity is elsewhere described as uncertain: he is believed to be on the Factualist side, though the narrator allows that he may be a Liquefaction agent. The party’s theatrical certainty therefore sits beside a broader uncertainty about whom A.J. serves. The episode also turns ceremony into its opposite. Its annual title, celebrity unveiling, curtain, and formal audience set up the expected rhythm of a hosted entertainment; the attack breaks that frame, and each attempted response produces more spectacle rather than restoring order. Hyslop’s habitual weariness and Hassan’s final expulsion suggest that the chaos is not an isolated breach but a recurring feature of A.J.’s public presence. The scene’s grotesque bodies and abrupt transformations make control seem less like a stable condition than a performance that can be overwhelmed, absorbed, or converted into another act of disorder.