Friday's Forgotten Book: Ride the Lightning by John Lutz

John Lutz, for better or for worse, is best known as the guy who penned SWF Seeks Same, which Hollywood turned into the Bridget Fonda vehicle Single White Female. He's done a lot more than that, though. His Wikipedia entry lists three series of books, thirteen stand alones and more short stories than I can be bothered to count. It was Lutz's short story from The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction that first got my attention, so when I ran across his novel Ride The Lightning in a used book store, I snatched it up.

Ride the Lightning is one of Lutz's Alo Nudger books. It's based on an Edgar winning short story, which originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in 1985. The perpetully down-on-his-luck Texas PI is hired by a white trash sweetheart to prove that her boyfriend, who is sitting on death row for killing a convenience store clerk during a robbery is innocent. Nudger knows the case is hopeless, but he takes it anyway. He needs the money. Of course, once Nudger starts poking around, he finds things aren't as cut and dried as they seem.

Ride the Lightning confirms my initial impression of Lutz as an excellent writer. You can add him to the list along with writers like Ed Gorman and James Reasoner who are criminially underrrated and unknown while people who murder the English language and the rules of good fiction make the bestseller lists. Ride the Lightning, and I suspect the rest of Lutz's work, are well worth your time.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Since the Layoffs

I have no idea if anyone is even still doing the whole forgotten book thing, but I want to mention Iain Levinson's 2003 novel Since the Layoffs. I'd heard good things about it, and there's been a copy on the shelf of my neighborhood used bookstore for at least a year, so I brought it home last week.

Levinson's novel may not have had much resonance when it was published because in 2003 homeless people were making down payments on million dollar homes with spare change and everyone was going to be rich, rich, rich forever. A novel about an laid off factory worker in an anonymous Midwestern town who turns to contract killing to fill the void once filled by his job might not have seemed all that relevant when the unemployment rate was four percent. Now that it's nearer to 10 percent (and a little over 10 percent here in Georgia), Levinson's story of blue collar angst hits a little close to home, even for those of us who have it pretty good. I think we're all a little more cognizant of the fragility of our situations.

Levinson's no Westlake. Since the Layoffs is not as good as The Ax, but Layoffs was Levinson's first novel, so it's probably unfair to compare the two books despite their thematic similarity. Levinson does a great job getting into the mind of his unemployed character, though, and portraying the reality and desperation of a man without a job. Everyone has to do something, and a man who doesn't have anything to do starts to feel desperate, more for existential reasons than for financial ones. When the local bookie asks unemployed Jake the chance to kill the bookie's cheating wife, Jake is initially repulsed, but relents, as much for the opportunity to feel useful again as for the money the job will bring. Killing is liberating for Jake, more for psychological reasons then pecuniary ones. And killing people is work. Jake has to deal with incompenent help and unexpected complications, but the lack of glamour doesn't bother him. It is a job after all. It's Jake's work ethic that gets him through, and that's why, even though he's a killer, you'll pull for him.

Friday's Forgotten Books: Carny Kill

In lieu of a review this week, I will bring you an entry in Patricia Abbot's Friday's Forgotten Books.

Robert Edmond Alter's Carny Kill is one of those now cliched tales of Florida weirdos written in 1966 before Florida weirdos were the most overexposed group of weirdos on the planet. (It's been reprinted twice, in 1986 and 1993, both times by Black Lizard, so it's easy to come by. I paid the princely sum of 54 cents for my copy.) Thax, a down on his luck carny (is there another kind?) wanders into Neverland, a Disneyland ripoff. He hits it off with the owner, gets a job, and then finds out May, his professional knife throwing ex-wife is married to the owner.

Thax is the laid back type, so he takes the news in stride and sticks around. When the owner turns up dead with one of May's knives in his chest, Thax starts looking into things, not because he feels anything toward his ex-wife, but becasue he knows the police will be looking at him because of his sordid past and relationship with May.

There's nothing particularly surprising in terms of plot in Carny Kill, but Alter is a clever writer and he makes Thax an appealing sleaze. The world of spielers, nautch girls and other hustlers is vividly drawn and it's a fun place to visit, although I wouldn't want to live there.

Friday's Forgotten Books: Dogs of God

Pinckney Benedict is not a prolific author. He's published a couple collections of short stories, but only one novel. Dogs of God, published in 1994, is a backwoods apocalypse. Set in the mountains of West Virginia, it revolves around two main characters: Tannhauser, a 12-fingered drug lord who imports illegal immigrants to use as slave labor on his marijuana plantation and Goody, a bare-knuckle brawler who makes his living fighting in honky-tonks. There is a large cast of supporting characters, including corrupt lawmen, a hermit and drug smugglers. For much of the novel, the characters go about their brutal business, but their paths gradually converge, and when they do the result is a conflagration so great that those lucky enough to survive come out scarred beyond recognition.

Benedict, a native West Virginian, uses his Appalachian setting to the fullest, and his depiction of men (and it is a book about men, not women) forging a hellish new society in a lawless wilderness gives us a view of human nature as bleak as that in Conrad's Heart of Darkness or Golding's Lord of the Flies. Men in their natural state, are little different from the insanely destructive wild hogs that populate the woods around them. They have the same animal urges, for sex, for blood, and they act on them without thought or consequence. Even Goody, the moral center of the book, is a fighter. He works beating men bloody in bars for cash. The only difference between Goody and the murderous drug runners is that his fights have rules, nebulous as they may be.

The book's climax is an apocalypse, in the true sense of the word, a "lifting of the veil," for Goody, who, after killing one of Tannhauser's lieutenants in a prearranged bar fight, end up on the plantation just as the shit hits the fan. He ends up, well, I won't spoil it for you, but suffice to say he emerges from the experience with a terrible revelation on his lips. Dogs of God is steeped in rural culture and old time religion, and Benedict's characters are the type of creations Flannery O'Connor would have dreamed up had she ended up with a Y chromosone instead of two X's.

(Thanks to Patti Abbot for the invitation to contribute)