Accident People, Delusional Heroes, Bad-Ass Chevys & the Devil's Daughter

FUN & GAMES, Duane Swierczynski
Another high-octane actioner from the guy who brought us The Wheelman, Severance Package and The Blonde, among others. This one finds former cop “consultant” and high-end house sitter Charlie Hardie in a fight for his life against The Accident People—a shady crew with unlimited resources who set up tragic deaths. Along with a washed-up young actress, Charlie struggles to stay one step ahead of the bad guys. Basically, FUN & GAMES is one amazingly suspenseful set piece after another. The thrills just keep coming and the fights, escapes, and close calls are relentless. It’s the literary equivalent a big-budget action movie.

GRAVEN IMAGE
A brutal but funny MF of a novella from Charlie Williams, GRAVEN IMAGE seems designed to keep the reader always a little off-kilter. The protagonist, Leon, tears across the pages in a mad search for his daughter, and he won’t allow anything to stand in his way. The real strength of this story is the slowly creeping realization that there is something… wrong… with Leon and his perception of events. About three-fourths of the way through, you start to get some ideas about what’s really happening, but that doesn’t lessen the horrible blow that comes when Leon finally realizes it himself. A different tone from Charlie’s Mangel novels, but equally compelling.

RAISE A HOLLER, Jason Stuart
This mad-cap romp through the backwoods of Colleden County is an amazingly fun page-turner. Redneck teens Hank and Billy, on a half-ass quest to find a cache of hidden bootleg booze, wind up on a—really, there’s no other way to put it—journey of self-discovery, encountering a family of vile females looking for a baby-daddy, a gaggle of drugged-out hippies, an escape by hot-air balloon, corrupt law, an insane swamp man, a bad-ass Chevy and a pampered tiger among other things. It’s a nicely episodic novel, one that makes it impossible to guess what madness the boys will stumble into next.

The Devil’s Music: When You’re a Stranger, Julia Madeleine
Julia Madeleine’s latest story of Sadie, the Devil’s daughter, claims another rock icon into the 27 Club. It’s Paris, 1971, and Sadie has come to claim her mad poet Jim this time. But WHEN YOU’RE A STRANGER is not just a simple appreciation of Jim Morrison, because that would be too easy. It’s a heartfelt meditation on the nature of love, beauty and loss that somehow still manages to avoid being maudlin or sentimental.

Hawthorne

"His sharp gray eyes took in everything relevant in a split second—there were four men, two of them armed. One was leveling his gun at Hawthorne, aiming when he should have been firing already, and Hawthorne shot him in the neck.

The other one was just slapping leather, and as the first gunman fell back into a jail cell, Hawthorne swung the Schofield around in the gun smoke and put a bullet into his chest. The force of it slammed the second man back into a set of metal bars, but he didn’t drop his gun. Hawthorne gave him a second to realize he was dead, but when the realization didn’t come fast enough he gave him another bullet in the gut to put a finer point on it."

Coming soon from Trestle Press, HAWTHORNE: THE LONG BLACK TRAIN

DIG TEN GRAVES for .99 cents

I didn't have anything to do with MILES TO LITTLE RIDGE being free for a couple days-- that was all David Cranmer's doing. But I'm glad he did it. Apparently, there were almost 7,000 downloads of the story in those two days, which is insane-but-cool, and it affected sales of some of my other work a bit as well. It's back at .99 cents today, and has been holding on to the #5 spot in Westerns on Amazon. A happy experiment, I'd say.

DIG TEN GRAVES, which is normally 2.99, went on sale for 99 cents that same day. Sales have bumped, but nothing drastic. It'll be on sale until January 15, if you're interested...

DIG TEN GRAVES .99 cents, MILES TO LITTLE RIDGE FREE

From now until my birthday, January 15, my short story collection DIG TEN GRAVES will be on sale for .99 cents. So if you haven't picked it up yet, now's the time. I recently found out that the lead-off story, "It Will All Be Carried Away", was an honorable mention for Ellen Datlow's Year's Best Horror Stories last year. I'd like to pump up some sales on it, so, you know... come on.

Also, and totally by coincidence, Mr. Edward A. Grainger has temporarily placed my Gideon Miles story MILES TO LITTLE RIDGE in Amazon's FREE DOWNLOADS. As we speak, it's the number one selling free Western download, with over 1,000 of those babies moved just in the last few hours. Saddle up, if you haven't already, or spread the word.

Books of the Week

I was lucky enough to end 2011 with two great reads, and to start 2012 with a couple more, equally good.

Just a couple days before the New Year, I got SOUTHERN GODS, by John Hornor Jacobs, in the mail. Dug right into it, as it was one I’d been looking forward to for a while. It did not disappoint. An inspired cross-pollinization of hard-boiled detective with creepy Lovecraftian horror, SOUTHERN GODS is pacey, structured beautifully, and just barrels along like mad toward a genuinely scary climax. There were several scenes in this book that actually creeped me right the hell out, which is a rare occurrence.

On the last day of the year, I dug into Andrew Bergin’s TOBACCO-STAINED MOUNTAIN GOAT, which was probably the oddest book I read all year. I had a few books in front of it on the TBR cue, but a terrific cover and an intriguing first page caused this one to jump the cue and become the last book of the year for me. Again, there’s some remarkable genre cross-over going on here, a sort of noir-ish flair rubbing up against a dystopian, Philip K. Dick bleakness. I was worried that Bergen, as a writer entirely new to me, wouldn’t be able to sustain the charm and solid writing in TSMG’s earliest pages, but I needn’t have worried. The man’s imagination is vivid and consistent, and his love of old films (woven so nicely throughout the story) will appeal to anyone who grew up watching Bogart flicks.

Went with a known quantity as my first book of ’12. Victor Gischler has never let me down, so I pulled up THE DEPUTY to ring in the new year. Gotta tell you, I think this is my favorite Gischler so far. The novel takes place over the course of one long, blood-soaked night as our young hero—a part-time deputy sheriff with no experience and no skills to speak of—must stay one step ahead of a wily group of professional killers. There’s lots of balls-out action in this one, great characters, and dead-on pacing.

Finally, last night, Tom Piccirilli’s FUCKIN’ LIE DOWN ALREADY has got to win some sort of award for Most Grueling Novella ever. Mortally wounded, and with his dead wife and son in tow, Clay sets out on a road trip to Hell, bent on revenge. His life seeping away with every second, he keeps holding on, holding on, until his bloody job is done. This is a gruesome, violent ride, horrific and heartfelt.

And that’ll do it this time.

By the way, this will probably be my new approach to talking about books here at Psycho-Noir. Just a round-up, sort of, every Thursday or Friday, of all the noteworthy things I’ve read over the week. Hope that works for all of you.

Damaged

Happy New Year, friends. Let’s talk for a minute about damaged people, our fascination with them, and why emotionally-scarred protagonists move us so much.

What was it, a couple of years ago now, when the actor Owen Wilson tried to kill himself? I don’t know all the particulars, nor do I really care that much, but I do recall a brief flurry of media attention about it that died away as quickly as it started. Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky character actor, seemingly without a care in the world, gets depressed over a girlfriend or some-such and tries to top himself… well, I’m not without compassion, even though I never gave Owen Wilson much thought before that. I silently wished him well and went on with things.

But I learned something interesting about my wife then. Like me, she’d never been particularly interested in Owen Wilson. But after his failed attempt at suicide, he was suddenly… intriguing. We watched a flurry of his movies, some good, some bad, and I got a sense that Kim was searching for something inside the actor, some indication of the turbulent waters that roiled under the surface of his easy grin.

Her fascination with him came and went pretty quickly, but I found it all quite telling. She, like almost all of us, is compassionate about the emotional pain that other people carry. But more than that, she—and we—find it… interesting.

While Wilson’s personal anguish was well-disguised until then, the writers we tend to deify wore their pain and discontent on their sleeves. I doubt anyone was surprised that day in ’61 when Hemingway topped himself. And who can say they were thrown for a loop when Hunter Thompson did the same thing? Edgar Allan Poe, Robert E. Howard, David Goodis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Patricia Highsmith, Dashiell Hammett, Kurt Vonnegut… our personal pantheons are crowded with writers who seemed driven by pain. Even the Patron Saint of American Writers, Mark Twain himself, was, in his later years, fueled by misery.

And the stories they wrote reflected it. The protagonists of their stories were, usually, not heroic in the traditional sense—they were desperate for… something. A sense of accomplishment, or closure, or self-worth. And more often than not, none of those things came by the end of the story.

There’s a looming sense of unresolved, open-endedness to the best stories from those writers, an absolute refusal to sugar-coat their fictional worlds. They were bitter reflections of the universe in the writer’s minds. Dark, unforgiving places where nothing pure could really take root and flourish.

Why do so many of us respond to that? Why do we find it so… satisfying?

Do we recognize that world?

Granted, there are many readers (maybe even the majority of them) who don’t want to linger there. They want real heroes to identify with, they want healthy relationships played out on the page, they want resolution, and to see the bad guys lose and the universe set right. Who can blame them for wanting that? And maybe those readers are mentally healthier than the rest of us.

Or maybe, just maybe, those readers are afraid of something. I don’t know.

As for me, I’ll take the damaged protagonist, and the ambiguous ending and the universe askew. I know that place and am comfortable there.

My Choices for Most Notable Books of the Year

I wasn’t going to do this. You know, post a list of my favorite reads of the year. There were just so many, is the thing. But seeing all the other “Best of” lists got me thinking, and I even posted a brief thing on Facebook about a couple of my favorites, so… what the hell.

Most of my reading this year was divided between Westerns (old and new) and a bunch of small-press indie releases, mostly on e-book. In fact, I don’t think I read a single new book all year that was put out by one of the major publishers. That wasn’t by design; it just worked out that way. But you know what? I didn’t miss the Big Boy Releases at all.

Anyway, sticking solely to novels, novellas and short story collections released in 2011, and in no particular order, here’s what I consider the cream of the crop:

THE LAST DEEP BREATH, Tom Piccirilli
GUN, by Ray Banks
CHOKE ON YOUR LIES, Anthony Neil Smith
MONKEY JUSTICE, Patti Abbott
SMOKE, Nigel Bird
BRIT GRIT, Paul D. Brazill
TOXIC REALITY, Katherine Tomlinson
THE END OF EVERYTHING, Megan Abbott
THE ADVENTURES OF CASH LARAMIE & GIDEON MILES, VOL. 2, Edward A. Grainger
ONE DEAD HEN, Charlie Williams
PULP INK, edited by Bird & Rhatigan
THE CHAOS WE KNOW, Keith Rawson

… and I’m going to add two more last-minute choices—last minute because one of them I only finished this morning, and the other I’m likely to finish before the night is over and unless it takes some sudden weird turn into shitsville it belongs here. They are:

SOUTHERN GODS, John Horner Jacobs
and
TOBACCO-STAINED MOUNTAIN GOAT, Andrew Bergen

That’s 14 books out of almost 200 I read this year, so please don’t feel too bad if your book isn’t on this list. You can be sure that, if I featured it here at this blog, I loved it.

Happy New Year.