Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby

 

African-American noir in a fast-moving car

Blacktop Wasteland is a heist novel that centers on the wheel man, the getaway driver, like a more realistic version of Edgar Wright's Baby Driver but just as exciting. I don't know anything about S.A. Cosby, but I assume he must be a car enthusiast because his descriptions of engine mechanics and driving seem to come from a place of personal knowledge rather than just research. 

Review

Cosby builds the novel on the classic crime noir setup. Beauregard "Bug" Montage, got off to a bad start in life doing petty crimes as a teenager until a job gone wrong ended him up in juvenile detention. By the time Bug got out, his father, Anthony (aka "Ant), had disappeared, never to be seen again. The only thing Ant left Bug was the souped-up Plymouth Duster they both loved. Bug turned it into a legendary street-racing machine and had the chops to drive it like no one else could. 

After the stint in juvie, Bug went straight. He bought an old garage and turned it into an auto repair shop. He remarried. (The first marriage had long since dissolved; they were both teens at the time.) And he had a successful business until a rival shop run by a franchise called Precision moved into town and undercut his prices. 

Because he couldn't beat Precision's prices, he lost customers and fell behind on his mortgage payments. Meanwhile, his son Darren needs glasses. His other son Javon had to get braces. His daughter Ariel, from the first marriage, is smart enough she could go to college and make something of herself if only she could afford the tuition. To top it all off, his mother is in a convalescent home, and he's just learned that there's a discrepancy with her Medicaid policy for which he now owes the government $48,360.

Bug is in desperate straights financially when Ronnie Sessions shows back up in his life. Ronnie is a redneck drug addict and career criminal who's always looking for the next score. He's also the screw-up who masterminded the job-gone-wrong that put Bug in juvenile detention way back when. But this time he's got a foolproof scheme. Ronnie's girlfriend Jenny is working at a jewelry store that is going to be temporarily holding $500,000-worth of uncut diamonds, and with her help they are going to take advantage of that window of opportunity to steal the diamonds. Reggie knows a guy who can fence the goods, giving them a clean $250,000 which Ronnie, Bug, and the gunman on the team, Quan, can split three ways. Eighty thousand dollars would go a long way toward solving Bug's problems.

But he quit the life. He has a wife and two sons he loves, a daughter he rarely sees but cares about, a difficult mother to take care of, an employee (and childhood friend) named Kelvin... he can't blow it all by getting caught or killed in a holdup. Bug's wife Kia tries to convince him, instead, to sell the beloved Duster, which is legendary in the county and would bring a very high price. Bug can't let go of that link to his father, though. So he tells himself that if he fully takes charge of the job, checks out everything personally, makes sure absolutely nothing can go wrong, then it's just one last job, and he'll be out of the life for good. 

You know this story, right? The "one last job and then I'm out" story? It's a good one. A classic, in fact. 

Ronnie and Quan both promised Bug they would stay away from coke for the duration of the job, but they lied. Ronnie also lied about the value of the diamonds, which was really more like $3,000,000. (If you were smarter than Ronnie, it would make you wonder why jewels that valuable would be passing through a rinky-dink, small-town jewelry store and who would be behind it.) In fairness to Ronnie, though, there's no way he could have known the fat lady who was Jenny's boss at the store was also a stone-cold killer. I won't tell you anything about what happens next except for the one thing you already know -- once the robbery starts, everything goes to hell big time, real fast. 

S.A. Cosby is a terrific writer. With this novel, he's already in the realm of the likes of Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos. The story is peopled with a fully realized cast of characters, the small-town Georgia settings feel lived in, the action sequences and tense encounters are white-knuckle stuff. If you like hard-boiled noir fiction, this one's for you. 

The Lost Continent by C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne

Once a best-selling author, now largely forgotten

The Lost Continent was first published in serialized form in 1899 and in book form the following year. Hyne was a successful writer of scientific romances and adventure tales whose career spanned the late Victorian era into the l930s. His work is almost entirely forgotten today except for The Lost Continent, a yarn about Atlantis, which has been reprinted several times over the intervening years. It is currently in print from the University of Nebraska and some on-demand publishers.

Review

The Lost Continent opens with that staple of the Victorian fantasy novel, the framing device. You are, after all, about to read a story that stretches credulity to the breaking point, and the author wants to assure you that he didn't just make it up. So he makes up a provenance for the story. In this case, the frame tale is told by an adventurer who accompanied an archeologist named Coppinger on an expedition to the Grand Canary Island off the Atlantic coast of Morocco. There they searched through caves, looking for artifacts of the ancient inhabitants. On the last day of their expedition, the unnamed narrator discovers, in a nearly inaccessible cave, a collection of talc tablets covered with a waxy substance that has Egyptian-looking characters incised into it. Eventually, Coppinger manages to translate the writing and provides a copy to our narrator who, as discover, is authorized to publish it. The tale that follows constitutes the rest of the book. 

The narrative written on the tablets is the first-person account of Deucalion, who had been Viceroy of the Atlantean colony of Yucatan for twenty years. At the beginning of the story, however, he is stepping down to be replaced by his successor, Tatho, because Deucalion has been summoned by the new Empress to return to Atlantis proper. Reports about the Empress Phorenice are mixed. She is said to be beautiful and extremely intelligent, having created marvelous new inventions (including, apparently, firearms). But she is also said have come to power by force (rather than as a member of the duly appointed priestly caste), that she claims to be the daughter of a God, and that she is a cruel tyrant.

Deucalion, who is himself a priest and a loyal subject of Atlantis, goes back, not knowing if he has somehow aroused Phorenice's displeasure and may be returning to his own imprisonment or execution. What he discovers instead is that in his twenty years of service his name has become known far and wide. He is renowned throughout Atlantis as an unparalleled military leader and as an administrator of unimpeachable wisdom, humility, and fairness. Phorenice has chosen him to become her husband because she is convinced no other man in the empire is worthy of her. 

She is as beautiful as he has been told, and though Deucalion has never had much need of women, he's not displeased with the prospect of becoming her husband and co-ruler of Atlantis. He soon finds, however, that the city-state is rent by unrest and that rebels protest violently at the gates. It is a far cry from the peaceful Atlantis that he knew before. Phorenice intends that Deucalion use his military prowess to crush the rebellions and enforce her iron-fisted rule. He also learns that she has no truck with the old Gods, for whom Deucalion is a pious believer and high-ranking priest and that she intends to declare herself Goddess as well as Empress. The old High Priest Zaemon, whom Deucalion served in the long-ago past, still lives, in exile, and opposes the blasphemous rule that Phorenice has brought to Atlantis. 

Zaemon's wife had adopted Phorenice as a child and raised her. Zaemon also has two biological daughters, Ylga and Nais. Though Ylga serves as fanbearer and courtier to Phorenice, she is the first person to warn Deucalion that he should be wary. Nais, meanwhile, is an active member of the opposition. In the course of events, Deucalion falls in love with Nais. 

Here come spoilers, so skip the next paragraph if you care about that sort of thing.

Deucalion eventually ends up in open opposition to Phorenice and, because she is too powerful to be easily defeated, spends several years hiding out and trying to survive in the dangerous outlands of the continent of Atlantis where flesh-eating dinosaurs still roam. Zaemon and his fellow priests plot the destruction of Atlantis by means of magical help from the Gods. (Or is it Atlantean technology?) Out of spite and jealousy, Phorenice forces Deucalion to kill Nais (though Deucalion finds a way to merely put her into suspended animation). And in the end... well, you already know what happens to Atlantis. The priests arrange for Deucalion and Nais to escape the sinking of Atlantis in an ark that contains the accumulated history and knowledge of Atlantis written on wax-covered tablets. Deucalion's mission is to carry this knowledge to another part of the world and establish a new Atlantis. But once they have come ashore on what will one day be Grand Canary Island, Deucalion decides that Atlantis' time has come and gone and, in defiance of the priests, wipes out the information on the tablets and writes down his own story instead. 

I enjoyed this story a great deal, but then I have a high tolerance for Victorian adventure novels. If 19th century adventure novelists like Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Edwin Arnold, and Eden Phillpotts, or early 20th century fantasy writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, appeal to you, then I'm pretty sure you'll like The Lost Continent. For those less inclined to enjoy such things, this won't be for you at all. Hyne gives Deucalion a somewhat stiff, archaic voice, but that is clearly intentional; he is, after all, an aristocrat belonging to a lost race. Deucalion, while a sympathetic protagonist, has out-of-date attitudes that feel appropriate for an ancient era -- owning slaves, for instance, is perfectly acceptable. It's difficult to place Hyne's Atlantis in time because, while he mentions places like Yucatan, Egypt, and Europe by name, the lost continent harbors mammoths, plesiosaurs, and dinosaurs among its fauna. Like Conan Doyle's Amazonian plateau in The Lost World, it is truly a region that exists outside of time. 

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa bought a how-to book to write her first novel 

Eileen (2015) was Ottessa Moshfegh's first published novel. She followed it up three years later with the NYT best-seller My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which I haven't read; but having read the reviews I know that it is about an alienated young woman who decides to try to sleep for a year after losing her job at an art gallery. Moshfegh is an excellent writer whose fiction explores the inner lives of misanthropic, unlikeable characters. 

Review

Eileen takes place over the course of the week leading up to Christmas 1962. The story is told retrospectively in the first person by the title character, Eileen Dunlop, from some fifty years in the future, when she is apparently living a better life under a different name. At the time of the story, Eileen is 24 years old, living at home with her father (an abusive, alcoholic ex-cop), and working as an assistant office administrator in a correctional institution for boys. Eileen had been taken out of her first year of college to come home and help out when her mother was dying. She never returned to college and now provides a modicum of care for her father, whom she hates. The "care" consists mostly of keeping him supplied with copious amounts of gin and making sure he doesn't wander around the neighborhood causing problems and eliciting visits from the police. (The old man, suffering from senile dementia and paranoid delusions, has a tendency, among other things, to point his service revolver threateningly at school children.) The approaching holiday plays little part in the events of the novel other than, perhaps, to emphasize the disaffection and squalid lives of the characters and provide a marker for Eileen's breakaway. 

If you're looking for a story with a plot, you'll be shit-out-of-luck with this one. The book consists entirely of Eileen's observations, obsessions, regrets, recriminations, delusions, and half-hearted future plans for about 220 pages. Then, a bit of a plot develops around 40 pages from the conclusion. It's this shift to a consequential sequence of events near the end of the novel that seems to have inspired some reviewers to compare the work to those of Hitchcock, Highsmith, and Jim Thompson, but nothing could be further from the truth. Eileen isn't a schemer or a psychopath; she's a lonely young woman looking for a way out of her desperate circumstances who ultimately seizes an opportunity with no idea what the next step will be. We gather from breadcrumbs dropped throughout the text that she will struggle for years and eventually find a comfortable place for herself in the world. (Earlier in the novel, in a bit of foreshadowing, she had noted the slogan "Per aspera ad astra" written on a pack of Pall Malls.) We don't learn anything about her later experiences, other than the fact that she eventually eliminates men from her life, but we gather that finding a peaceful, fulfilling existence is indeed possible even for someone like Eileen.

The narrative is almost unremittingly bleak, although punctuated here and there with bits of black humor. (I wonder if Moshfegh read Louis-Ferdinand Céline.) Having never had sex, Eileen fantasizes about it often in ways that are not at all constrained to the politically correct. It's an interesting journey if you're up for the challenge of spending a few days inside the head of a character who will often disgust you. The ending, however, doesn't quite live up to the promise offered by the final turn of events; so the novel ultimately feels unfulfilling.

The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

Doris had some ambivalent feelings about motherhood

The Fifth Child is a very short novel, consisting of 132 pages in the Vintage edition, told in a continuous, limited-third-person narrative that has neither chapter breaks nor line breaks. This lack of any sort of pause has the effect of compelling the reader to keep turning pages and to make short work of the book. Nevertheless, Lessing packs a tremendous amount of resonance into the story, leaving you with as much to ponder as you would find in many a longer work. 

Review

The novel opens at a large office party in London during the swinging '60s. Two of the people attending that party -- David Lovatt and Harriet Walker -- stand apart from the festivities because they don't feel particularly at home in this milieu. The wallflowers spot each other across the room. Recognizing that they are two of a kind, they meet, find a quiet place to talk, and eventually go back to David's apartment. They find that they have the same attitudes toward many things, including an old-fashioned desire to have a large family.

In short order, they begin living together in David's flat and then get married. Both want to find a big house in which to raise children. The search takes them outside of London, where they eventually find a three-story home that captures their hearts. Living there will mean a long commute to work for David, however, and it's more expensive than he can afford on his salary. David's father, James, has remarried to a wealthy woman, though, and they have more than enough money to help the young couple with the mortgage, which they willingly do.

Children then come in quick order, as well. Luke, Helen, Jane, and Paul are born in the course of six years. The large house becomes the center of the extended family as David's two sets of parents and his sister and Harriet's widowed mother and her three sisters' families all come to spend Easter and summer and Christmas holidays around the enormous dining table, eating and drinking, partying and playing together, sometimes for weeks at a time. Harriet and David's wild, impractical dream has come true. David's father James helps with the finances, while Harriet's mother Dorothy comes to live with them for months at a time to help out with the children and the household chores. The children are each and every one lovely and smart and happy.

But David and Harriet aren't content with just four children. It's all so wonderful that they want the happiness to keep growing. Why not have six children? Why not eight? Their parents and siblings constantly warn them not to overdo it, but the young couple will hear nothing of it. Harriet does want to take a pause after Paul's birth; but one night, far too soon, David makes love to her again, and, again, she's pregnant.

This time the pregnancy does not go well. The fetus inside her seems to grow too fast, moving about, delivering powerful kicks, making her sick all the time. She thinks the unborn baby is poisoning her. She's sure it is going to rip its way out of her. The fifth child, Ben, is born after only eight months; but he weighs eleven pounds. The infant is enormously strong, and he has a forehead that slopes "from his eyebrows to his crown," where a thatch of yellow hair grows. Harriet thinks he looks like a troll, or a goblin. 

Within only a few weeks, Harriet begins feeding Ben from a bottle; his hunger is too great and his powerful gnawing too painful for her to breastfeed him. He seems to have no need of maternal affection. Even as an infant his eyes are cold and malevolent. While still a baby, he kills a terrier that someone in the family had brought over. Shortly afterward he kills the family cat and nearly succeeds in breaking the next-youngest child Paul's arm. The other children come to fear him, as do the other adults in the extended family. Ben had already begun the strain the happy family before he was born by keeping Harriet always in pain and unable to tend to her other children. Now, as a baby, he is so frightening and destructive that Harriet has to watch him all the time, essentially abandoning David and her other children. 

There comes a time when David and the other adults prevail on Harriet that Ben must be institutionalized. When she finally agrees to this, they bundle him up and ship him off to an unnamed place in Northern England. Things then begin to normalize in the Lovatt family, though Paul remains traumatized because his fear of Ben had known no limits. Eventually Harriet insists on going to see Ben, to find out how he is being treated at the institution. It turns out to be a nightmarish place that makes the place Frances Farmer was put into look like a spa, a place where unwanted children with physical and mental maladies are dumped, never to be visited by their kin again, and where most die after a short time. Harriet finds Ben drugged into unconsciousness, covered in piss and shit, and naked except for a straightjacket. She insists on taking him home, even though the attendants at the institution warn her that she has no idea what she's getting into.

David and the other children feel utterly betrayed by Ben's return. And, indeed, Ben is filled with an uncontrollable rage that begins to destroy the family again. The older children, Luke and Helen, go off to boarding schools and spend their breaks with the grandparents. Jane soon follows suit, moving in with Harriet's sister during the breaks. Only Paul remains at home, terrified and becoming more and more socially maladapted himself. While Harriet hates Ben, she can't bring herself to abandon him to be killed in an uncaring institution, even if it ruins everything else in her life. 

As the novel goes on from this point, we see Ben grow older and form relationships outside the family. By the age of eleven he is already the leader of a gang of older boys while he remains cold and unknowable. Harriet and David believe he is a throwback to some earlier level of evolution, a genetic anomaly that may be closer to the Neanderthal than the human. In any event, the dream of the big happy family is long dead. As the couple muse over what life might be like someday when Ben is gone, Harriet expresses her belief that they were cursed because they wanted too much and were struck down for their hubris. David rejects this, seeing it only as bad luck, an unfortunate roll of the dice.

This summary really doesn't convey anything of the rich complexity and strangeness of the novel. For such a short book, it has a large cast of characters, most of whom I have either not at all or else barely touched on. And what exactly was Doris Lessing getting at here? Certainly every parent understands what a fearful thing the throw of the genetic dice can be, as well as the sometimes ambivalent feelings we have about our children. Then, too, there's the anxiety we all feel about the fact that forces in the world we can't control can destroy everything we've tried to build for ourselves.

 
Lessing once said she didn't understand why critics were always trying to explain what a novel is "really about." She's right to leave you pondering. I understand there's a sequel to The Fifth Child, called Ben, in the World. I'll probably read it. 

Nightfall by David Goodis

You can't escape the fickle finger of fate?

You may remember a bestselling nonfiction book that came out back in 1981 called When Bad Things Happen to Good People in which a rabbi gives advice on dealing with grief. Separated from its context, I've always felt that title sums up what a lot of noir fiction is all about. As for why bad things happen to good people, noir's answer is: there is no why, shit just happens.

Review

Cornell Woolrich, whom some credit with inventing noir, was the master of plots built around the random, meaningless accident that changes a life -- a brick falls off a building and robs a man of his memory, a whiskey bottle thrown from a plane kills another man's fiancé, and so on. And to be honest, some of those people bad things happen to weren't so good to begin with. Just unlucky.

David Goodis, the author of Nightfall, was also an accomplished master of stories about the noir twist of fate. In this novel, the protagonist, Jim Vanning, pulls off the highway to help the survivors of an automobile accident. But the men in that roadside accident just stole $300,000 from a bank, and it turns out they are going to be needing a little more help from Vanning than he had bargained for -- and they'll get it at gunpoint. That's what being a Good Samaritan gets you in the noir universe.

Jim expects to die before his involvement in the getaway is over. But then he's confronted with an opportunity to escape that seems too good to be true. It is, of course, a setup. But the setup goes wrong, Jim shoots and kills one of the criminals in self-defense, and he really does escape -- with the satchel full of thousand-dollar bills.

While there are violent scenes and some bareknuckle fights, Nightfall can't be called a hardboiled action novel. Goodis injects too much existential handwringing and philosophical pondering for this to be anyone's idea of fast-paced. That said, though, it's a twisty little tale that keeps your attention for the two or three hours it takes to read. My only complaint is that the story relies on my least favorite plot device, amnesia, and, to make it worse, I really believe Goodis could have made the story work without that crutch.

Nightfall was published in 1947 but feels surprisingly modern for a crime novel of the era. Sure, Jim is a war vet, everybody smokes cigarettes like there's no such thing as cancer, and traditional gender roles are taken for granted. But there's little in the way of macho posturing or misogyny. The wife of the detective who's after Jim is the detective's greatest ally and confidant, and Jim longs for nothing but marriage and a family. Even the villain, "John," is clearly a man who's been wounded by life; he doesn't want to kill anyone, he just wants the money so he can sail away from all this grief with his girlfriend, and never come back.

John won't get that break. But here's where Goodis breaks with the true noir tradition: in the end Jim has a glimmer of hope.

Needful Things by Stephen King

Uncle Stevie has just the thing for you

By a quick count, I figure I've read more than thirty of Stephen King's books at this point, which is about half of his output so far. I just now got around to reading 1991's Needful Things, and I'm sorry to say it's not going on my favorites list.

Review

The premise is simple and quite promising: A stranger comes to the small town of Castle Rock and opens a store, a kind of a curiosity shop to outward appearances. The owner (Leland Gaunt) always has in stock (or will soon) the one item that each individual who comes into the shop desires more than anything else. Of course, the real price of that item will be far greater than money.

The premise is simple and very promising: A stranger comes to the small town of Castle Rock and opens a store -- kind of a curiosity shop to outward appearances. The owner (Leland Gaunt) always has in stock (or will soon) the one item that each individual who comes into the shop desires more than anything else. Of course, the real price of that item will be far greater than money.

Introducing a supernatural or alien element into a small town and watching its inhabitants spin out of control is a plot device that King employs often and well. King excels at creating a large cast of characters, each with their own compelling back story, and playing them off against one another. A great deal of the novel consists of Gaunt snaring the locals with irresistible bait and thereby enlisting them in his scheme. When he trips the final switch on that scheme, the town erupts into an orgy of madness and violence that has you turning the pages as fast as you can.

The problem is that the scheme is so elaborate it takes a painfully long time to set up and entails a lot of repetition of the same elements. It's obvious from the beginning what kind of creature Gaunt is (there are no twists at the end). When reading a story about the supernatural you have to suspend disbelief to some level, but the final battle between Gaunt and the sheriff involves some less-than-believable elements that just seem silly.

King says he intended Needful Things to be not so much a horror story as a satire on 80s greed and consumerism. Clearly, the "needful things" are also a metaphor for addiction, and King is said to have just gone clean from all of his (except cigarettes) when he wrote this novel. Whatever the author's intentions, Needful Things ultimately doesn't come together as a fully satisfying work. 

Summer of Night by Dan Simmons

Simmons writes science fiction, horror, and mysteries

After an intriguing opening, this 600-page tome felt like slow going for a long time; but the action and suspense definitely pick up in the second half.

Review

Summer of Night (1991) reminded me in many ways of Stephen King's It (1986), which I suspect provided Simmons with a great deal inspiration for the later novel. In both books a group of kids come together to fight an ancient evil that has been lying fairly dormant in their small town for a while. The flashbacks in It are set in 1957-1958, while the action in Summer of Night takes place in 1960. The 30-year "Nostalgia Pendulum" was in full swing for both authors.

Summer of Night also reminded me of Robert McCammon's Boy's Life, which was published in 1991 and set in the early 1960s as well. It and Summer of Night feature ensemble casts of kids who work together to fight the evil that is out to get all of them. But, while his friends play their roles, Boy's Life is really Cory's show. Coming-of-age horror novels are fairly common. (Stephen King has written a slew of them, from Carrie to The Institute), but I don’t believe there are a lot where a group of kids work together and are all more-or-less equally important to the narrative.

It's a long, slow read but ultimately worth the time investment. Simmons uses those 600 pages to craft believable characters and interesting relationships between them. The novel ends with a pyrotechnic blow-out as the kids finally confront, on its own turf, the evil entity that has lurked in the placid town of Elm Haven all these years. 

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

There's more than one way to be a good Indian.

For contemporary readers, the title of this novel may feel a bit cringeworthy. Teddy Roosevelt probably coined the phrase, "The only good Indians are the dead Indians." It expressed the attitude many white settlers held that Native Americans were vicious and immoral, and that ultimately the only way to deal with them was to either kill them off or completely assimilate them. The author reflects on how this sentiment still affects the lives of tribal people. The men in the book avoid terms such as "Native American" or "Indigenous Peoples," preferring instead to call themselves "Indians," the name they grew up with. This is a horror novel that also attempts to reclaim the idea of the "Indian's curse," turning it back on tribal people themselves. 

Review

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones is about four Blackfeet men -- Ricky, Lewis, Gabriel, and Cassidy -- who commit a crime in their youth, which brings a curse down on them for which payment comes due a decade later. In a short preface, we see Ricky leave a crowded roadside bar in North Dakota to relieve himself somewhere in the back of the parking lot. While he's doing that, a young elk clambers up onto a truck, doing damage and setting off alarms. The elk begins to dash wildly around the parking lot, damaging more trucks and setting off more alarms, and then charging head-down toward Ricky. He grabs an oversized wrench from a truck bed, planning to use it to protect himself, but the elk disappears. As angry men coming running toward their trucks, Ricky realizes he looks like the culprit who has done all the damage. He turns and runs across the frozen prairie, hoping to escape the mob, only to find his way blocked by a herd of elk. Ricky is beaten to death.

In part one of the book, we meet another member of the group, with the unlikely name Lewis Clarke, who is, like Ricky, also living off the reservation. Lewis lives with his white girlfriend, Peta. He works at the post office, where he has been assigned to train a new employee, Shaney, a Crow, the only other Indian who works there. Lewis recognizes that the other employees have naturally grouped the two of them together in their minds.

At home, Lewis has begun to have disconcerting visions of a dead elk in his living room. That vision morphs into another -- an elk-headed woman -- which begins to haunt him. Lewis eventually tells Shaney the story of the event that has troubled him all these years. As young men, the four friends had been hunting elk on the reservation without any luck. On the last day of the hunting season, as a snow storm was rising, the four of them ventured into land that was reserved for the elders to hunt, and ended up killing a number of elk by firing blindly into the herd. As Lewis took on the elk he had chosen as his to clean, he realized it was a young, pregnant doe that was merely crippled, not dead. It had to be shot again. He buried the unborn calf. The four men were caught in the midst of the crime by the game warden, Denny Pease, who forced them to leave the meat behind, pay a fine, and never hunt on the reservation again.

Peta is annoyed to learn that Lewis chose to share this story with Shaney but not with her. Subsequent events that I won't go into lead Lewis to become more and more paranoid, thinking that either Peta or Shaney is really what he has come to think of as the Elk Head Woman, a vengeful spirit that is out to destroy him. Eventually he murders both of the women horribly, violently, bloodily. There's no way that he could get away with it, even if he were thinking rationally. He flees, only to be hunted down and killed, not too differently from Ricky, by a vigilante mob. The reader has, up to this point, been unsure whether Lewis was really haunted by a vengeful spirit, or whether he was suffering some sort of mental breakdown. This is a bit of a spoiler, but there's no way to avoid it: at the beginning of section two, the point of view switches to that of the Elk Head Woman.

Two men from that fateful day -- Gabe and Cass -- are still close and still living on the Blackfeet reservation. The avenging spirit of the young elk turns her attention to them and to everyone around them. Gabe and Cass have decided to build a lodge and hold a sweat to honor the memory of their two dead friends. A local cop named Victor has asked Gabe and Cass let his son Nathan join them in the sweat, hoping the experience will purify Nate of some of his bad behavior. In return, Victor will manage the hot stones which have to be brought into the lodge periodically. When Elk Head Woman arrives at the lodge, she launches into a purge of her own.

Earlier in this section, we met Gabe's daughter Denorah. While Gabe is separated from his wife and not living with the two of them, he is deeply proud of his daughter, calling her his "Finals Girl" because it is she who will take her team to the basketball finals and ultimately the championship. Denorah comes to Cassidy's place the evening of the sweat lodge ceremony to pick up some money her father had promised her, but she arrives on the scene as Elk Head Woman is wreaking her bloody vengeance.

 
The third section of the book concerns Elk Head Woman's pursuit of Denorah through the wilderness to finish her vengeance. And, yes, this is where I laughed when I finally realized the author's pun in calling Denorah the Finals Girl all along.

I'll leave the summary there. If you're interested, you can find out for yourself how the final confrontation ends. Though some people seem to find Jones' prose difficult to parse, I think he writes beautifully; and the narrative becomes clearer as the tale progresses. Besides the horror story itself, the book provides interesting insights into contemporary Native American experiences. All of that said, I thought the precipitating event for the curse was a bit thin and unconvincing, so knock a point off for that. 

Pulp by Ed Brubaker

The king of contemporary crime comics.

Pulp (July 2020) is a short graphic novel written by Ed Brubaker and drawn by Sean Phillips, a team that has become renowned for their crime comics series such as Criminal and Fatale. The story is set in New York in 1939 and concerns an elderly pulp Western writer named Max Winters. Max is best-known for writing a series about a gunslinger called the Red River Kid. As the yarn opens, Max has submitted the latest installment to his editor, Mort, at Six-Gun Western magazine. The editor is pleased with the story except for the ending, which seems to indicate that the Kid and his sidekick are planning to retire to Mexico. Max explains that he wants to show the whole arc of his protagonist's life, not just his youthful days as an outlaw. 

Max: Howard did this exact thing with Conan and no one complained. Sometimes he's old... sometimes he's young...

Mort: Yeah, but he's never a fuckin' farmer in Mexico, is he?

The ending is redlined, and Max is sent on his way with a payment that has been reduced to two cents a word because, as the unsympathetic Mort explains, "our circulation went down forty percent last year.” 

As if his day weren’t already going badly enough, on his way home Max sees a young orthodox Jew being bullied by a pair of antisemitic thugs at the subway station. Unlike the other passersby, Max can’t ignore what’s happening and intervenes. He gets punched for his trouble, and in the midst of the beating that follows has a heart attack. As Max lies helpless on the ground, the two goons rob him of the money he was just paid.

Max survives the heart attack. A doctor gives him some pills and tells him to cut out alcohol and cigarettes. When he finally arrives home, he tells his younger wife, Rosa, about the mugging. She assures him that they’ll get by without the money somehow and goes to the kitchen to make him something to eat. Max reflects on how Rosa’s love saved his life and worries about the fact that, as he well knows, they really can’t get by without the money.

We then learn that Max’s pulp tales about the Red River Kid are really memories, stories about Max’s own life when he was an outlaw in the West known as the Red Rock Kid. After a reckless life of robbing and fighting, he really did retire to Mexico for a time, marry, and try his hand at farming. Now, struggling to get by and to support his Mexican wife in New York in his old age, he decides to resort to robbery once more. His plans are cut short, however, by an ex-FBI agent who has been following him for some time. Watching him case an armored car route, the agent has figured out what Max is up to and stops him from going through with it. Instead, he enlists Max into helping him rob American Nazis who are shipping cash to the Fatherland to support Hitler’s war. He explains, “We’d be robbing some people who deserve it... and it wouldn’t be like that suicide run you were planning.” 

The plot takes a few twists and turns on the way to the ending, and I won’t spoil it. I will say that the story is satisfyingly well-written and draws down to a conclusion that has the feeling of inevitability. Max has a dire philosophy about the way the world works that is never proven wrong. 

On a meta level, the story provides an interesting reflection on the fact that the late period of the Old West (the 1890s) was only thirty to forty years removed from the era of famous gangsters, the Great Depression, and the beginnings of World War II. People were beginning to drive around in automobiles back East at the same time the cattle wars were still going on out West. Time periods that seem distinct to us because of the movies blended into each other for the people who were alive then. Another meta-level reflection, one that makes the story feel especially relevant to our own time, is the reminder that, before our own entry into the war, a lot of Americans cheered on Hitler and supported his rise to power. 

The Loop by Jeremy Robert Johnson

 

Did this Robert Johnson meet the Devil at a crossroads? 

I hate marketing copy that says a book is like x crossed with y. It's lazy and it's rarely accurate. Mostly, the marketing department is looking for an easy way to grab onto the coattails of what is popular at the moment. Right, so... I'm going to make one of those comparisons in this review, anyway. 

Review

In the early pages of The Loop, a high school student begins having some sort of seizure in class. He suddenly becomes hyperviolent and, before first-responders to the scene shoot him, viciously murders one of his teachers in front of everyone. This happens near the end of the school year. Rather than try to bring students back to school after the traumatic event, the district cancels classes for the rest of the year, and graduating seniors will be mailed their diplomas rather than receiving them in a ceremony. As a result, a number of students in this small, central Oregon town decide to have an end-of-school party one night at some caves in the nearby mountains.

In the wake of the killings, the son of one of the more prominent families has gone missing. While the authorities are searching for him fruitlessly, he is holed up in one of the caves where the party is going to take place. Whatever was wrong with that other student is wrong with him, too, and he plans to share. Before the party night is over, a plague of violence will be unleashed on the town. Only a small group of students who managed to escape the infection will remain to stand in the way of the others.

The blurbs for the book inevitably invoke Stranger Things, but that's a misleading comparison. It's not a book about kids on bikes fighting otherworldly creatures. The more apt comparison -- one I think the author himself made -- would be Dazed and Confused crossed with 28 Days Later. The students are slackers, druggies, jocks, and all the other social gradations to be found in a high school. In an interview, Johnson said he was inspired by the social dynamics of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, with its the rich kids versus "greasers," to attempt something similar in a more up-to-date context. The main protagonists, Lucy and Bucket, are perhaps the ultimate outsiders: an adopted Peruvian orphan and a child of Pakistani immigrants. They both have to navigate not only the tensions caused by their racial heritages in a mostly white rural town but also the pressures of a town where the disparity between rich and poor is stark.

While the setup and the inspiration may be Young Adult, the novel doesn't stay in that lane. By the second half it has veered into something closer to what David Schow called "splatterpunk." The high school kids have the homicidal energy of the infected in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later or either version of The Crazies, and the author isn't shy about describing the mayhem in vivid detail. While tourism may be the town's main industry, its most prominent employer is a biotech firm called IMTECH. And it is, of course, an IMTECH experiment gone wrong that has unleashed biomechanical parasites engineered from alien octopus tissue and an Internet-based hive mind on the unsuspecting denizens of Turner Falls.

The Loop starts slow, taking time to build out its young protagonists as believable characters, and then it kicks into overdrive with a fast-paced narrative style that invites you to quickly rush through to the end. To the author's credit, he follows the logic of the book's premise to its bitterly inevitable outcome. Honestly, it's fine, but there's nothing new here. My only complaint is that there aren't enough new ideas or narrative-shifting twists to warrant the novel's 300-page length. I'd give it an extra star if it were a hundred pages shorter.