NEGATIVE TILT, by Bobby Mathews, reviewed by Wes Browne

Bobby Mathews’s story collection NEGATIVE TILT is brimming full with bangers that run the gamut from literary to crime—the best of which straddle the line. Sentences hum, sharply-drawn and layered characters propel the action, and the pacing and plotting are right on point, luring us along as he pours out a trail of the good stuff.

Mathews is at his best when he treads the ground he knows well: the death throes of the newspaper industry. Several stories explore this territory, but none better harnesses that strength than the title story, NEGATIVE TILT, when a pragmatic lifer who has been cast out of his position as a writer continues his relationship with a former colleague from behind the wheel of a tow truck. The story is certainly a noir, but it hues more literary than crime, to grand effect.

The first purely crime story that grabs you by the shirt and gives you a shake is THE GHOST OF BUXAHATCHEE CREEK. As it turns out, even a righteous kill can haunt the doer, and in this story of seedy vengeance, what can’t be undone can still be doubled down.

Mathews proves himself adept and versatile, weaving lanes between lovers done wrong, to tales of double cross and vengeance. He flexes his hard-earned newspaperman chops time and again by sticking to what’s interesting and building suspense all while moving stories along on the way to a final payoff.

If I had one wish for the collection, it would be that it was a little bit tighter. At 263 pages and twenty-eight stories, NEGATIVE TILT feels more boxed set than greatest hits. There are just a few “B” stories included that that don’t quite measure up to the rest, and a couple other stories are similar in structure and theme. Hard choices could have been made. In the back half there are also several consecutive flash stories, all of them good. Interspersing them throughout would have provided a welcome change-of-pace.

NEGATIVE TILT has staked its claim as one of the standout noir collections of the year. Fans of the style will eat this one up and ask for more.

Wes Browne's new novel THEY ALL FALL THE SAME will be published January 7, 2025 by Crooked Lane Books. His 2020 book HILLBILLY HUSTLE was named one of Merriam-Webster's 17 recommended lockdown reads. He is the founder and host of Pages & Pints Reading Series at Apollo Pizza in Richmond, Kentucky. He has practiced law as a criminal defense attorney, prosecutor, and public defender in Appalachia for over 24 years.

JACKED, a review, by Rusty Barnes

 

Jacked: a crime fiction anthology

Editor: Vern Smith

Run Amok Books

7/1/22

$18.99

Jacked is an anthology edited by Vern Smith,packed with the good stuff. It proves that crime fiction is in fine shape with these writers, as many of them have not published widely and are not on the same list of eight or ten writers who normally inhabit crime fiction anthologies. Two names leap out at me because I know their work: Eric Beetner, who's everywhere, and Meagan Lucas.

Beetner is in fine form here, with an entry titled First Timers, a story that turns on its ear the typical car theft story. Ashton and Clark steal a car, sure, take it for a joyride, sure, but find out too late Gene''s locked in the trunk. They let him out, and the stakes get higher.

A gunshot cut through the room. Gene yelped and went down clutching his leg. I looked around the room and saw a smoking gun in the hands of one of the men. Ashton and I froze. I dropped the blood-stained screwdriver. Two men rushed Gene, disarmed him, and put their feet down on his back, pinning him in place.

   

"Who the fuck are you two?" the gunman asked.

Beetner's plot is a nifty and simple one. Pile the trouble on and turn the tables at least twice. It's a good strong story, the prose effortless and punchy, like the best pulp stories.

Meagan Lucas, author of Songbirds and Stray Dogs, a fine novel from Main Street Rag, weighs in with a story of a poor woman and her children,  Picking the Carcass, in which the woman is given a last chance to move up in the world via an extremely unlikely source. The beginning heralds a writer with a gimlet eye, right down to the shows the children watch and the diet of a family used to SNAP benefits without much fresh food. It's a quiet story that maxes out in details that a more flamboyant writer would overshoot, in this case quite literally. "She picked up the shotgun and held it against the skin of the dog's belly, whispered "I'm so sorry, BIg Guy," and pulled the trigger. Droplets peppered her face, but she didn't care. It hadn't sounded right." Quiet yet apt.

These stories are the highlights for me in an anthology packed to the gills with good stuff. Vern Smith harvested a handy crop of writers in this one, with barely an unworthy story. Other excellent pieces from Zephaniah Sole and Andrew Miller round out this anthology, the first, I believe, from Run Amok Books. I hope to hear more from them in the near future, and thank them for gathering a crime fiction anthology that doesn't rest on contributions from the usual suspects.

Lockdown: Stories of Crime, Terror, and Hope During a Pandemic

$17.95/9.49

Polis Books

June 2020

reviewed by Paul J. Garth

When asked to review “LOCKDOWN: Stories of Crime, Terror and Hope During a Pandemic”, I was hesitant to say yes. I’d seen a couple of publications put out calls for pandemic themed issues, and in almost every instance, I’d grown instantly weary reading the calls, not just because I didn’t trust the editors of those particular magazines to be able to handle such a serious subject with the care needed, though that was a part of it, but also because the nature of the calls seemed too timely, too on the nose, too expectant to use a readers own anxiety about this particular moment in the world against them. Many of us have been homebound for months, watching updates on death counts and infection rates climb higher and higher as we try to make our way though some new kind of normal. How many stories would be able to both respect the place we’re in, and also tell a good story that could exist independent of this particular moment?

 

    The other reason I was hesitant to review “Lockdown” is much simpler; I’m friends with more than half of these writers, conversing with a majority of them at least once a week, if not more. How much could my review be worth if that detail wasn’t disclosed up front? How honest could I really be? If “Lockdown” was another average collection, how could I write a review that was both fair to people I’m friends with, and to anyone who reads the review?

 

    Thankfully, both issues ended up being moot, as “Lockdown” is a thoughtful, challenging, terrifying, humorous, and deeply sad anthology that comes close to greatness, though it is held back by just a couple stories that don’t quite connect. 

   

The book opens with Gabino Iglesias’s, “Everything is Going to be Okay,” which happens to be one of the single best crime fiction stories of the year. The story of Pablo, an uninsured fisherman whose wife is sick with COVID-19, and a fishing expedition from hell, Iglesias uses his personal and emotive prose to illustrate a life unseen by too many of us with extraordinary humanity and care. From the day to day struggles of getting through a pandemic in the face of a heartless system that doesn’t care, to what living without any kind of a safety net can make a man capable of, and what happens when a person truly has no choice but to do something they do not want to do, there isn’t a detail wasted or that feels anything other than richly lived and deeply earned. As deep and murky as the Gulf Pablo fishes, Iglesias sets the tone, and the bar for the rest of “Lockdown” incredibly high. More crime fiction should be like this. 

    Next up is Rob Hart with “No Honor Amongst Thieves” a home invasion story presented in a non-linear fashion. What at first appears to be a story working on a common fear, especially now that so many of us are home constantly, slowly turns into something else, an attack on the soulless machine that, arguably, has exasperated the situation we’re all living through and that has callously allowed so many to die. That some characters in Hart’s story die violently from something other than the pandemic does not muddle the point; dead is dead, and people are profiting off those deaths. There’s a sense of rage underneath this story, and while it is, in many ways, a flipside to Iglesias’s piece, together they posit a sad yet undeniable point that, in America, at least, money, not human decency or compassion, is all that can keep you safe.

    If you’re sensing a theme of class so far, it is absolutely there, and the use of this theme in several stories is a highpoint of “Lockdown”. Everyone who wrote a story for this acknowledges there are two worlds in a lockdown, the world of those who can stay home and protect their health because of economic stability, and the world where missing even a day of work could have a far more dire outcome than just illness. Steve Weddle and Angel Luis Colon offer stories speaking to these issues as well. In Weddle’s “At the End of the Neighborhood” an armed Homeowners Association from hell steps into the world of the fearful middleclass, examining how close some people are to becoming monsters based on fear and suspicion alone. Understated, and in some ways reminiscent of a plague-based retelling of “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street”, Weddle captures suburban ennui and boredom while the world rages and burns outside a cozy commuter community, unable to look away from what must surely come next. Colon’s story, “Your List” explores similar fears, this time set in a high-rise apartment block, where the confines of lockdown help shape you (the story is masterfully told in a breathless, ever escalating, second person) into a peak physical specimen, paranoid of catching the ravaging disease, until a random knock at the door explodes into intimate violence. 

These stories, the stories where the pandemic is real, where characters are caught up in something that resembles what we see outside our own windows, make up many of the best stories in “Lockdown”, but not all. For an anthology featuring writers mostly known for their crime fiction, “Lockdown” doesn’t take long to start showing its interest in the speculative. Starting with Renee Asher Pickup’s “Desert Shit”, many of the stories imagine something much worse than what we’re living through, superbugs that have decimated society and left the survivors with a fearful half life that is quickly running out of time (for levity, it should be noted, in almost every superbug story, there’s a line about a certain orange skinned President dying, either offscreen, or by coughing out his lungs in the middle of a national address). In Pickup’s story, two criminals steal a pallet of bleach, then hide away, losing themselves in drugs and sex until, days later, they check their phones and see the world has gone to hell. Struggling to get across town, they travel the deadlands of a desert community where cops where full HAZMAT suits and have been ordered to shoot anyone outside of their homes.

 

Others, like Jen Conley’s “Fish Food”, examine what, exactly, an expectant mother would do in the face of a disease whose transmission almost always equals death. A slower, personal story, “Fish Food” stands out as amongst the best in the collection because of its impressive worldbuilding, its lived in pacing, and its willingness to look hard questions in the eye and give definitive answers. “Apocalypse Bronx” from Richie Narvaez similarly moves through a devastated world, this time through the eyes of a corrupt cop sent to kill a witness who has been offloaded from the hospital in order to allow staff to handle the spiking disease. A nighttime gauntlet through New York City, devastated by the second, mutated wave of COVID, Narvaez’s story is both entertaining and timely, and, with its well thought out descriptions of a second wave, one of the most unnerving to those of us reading in the present. 

 

Others go even further, positing a world in which Ghosts, because of the lockdown, become lonely, where monsters gain free roam of the earth due to the decimation of disease, and where the United States has fallen, leaving only Mexican and South American drug cartels in control of most of North America. “Misery Loves Company” by Ann Dávila Cardinal tells a story of loneliness and betrayal, where a long-rumored ghost on a college campus becomes so upset with those who no longer fill the school’s halls, it starts haunting, and killing, faculty over Zoom calls. That sounds like an insane premise, a story that absolutely should not work. That it does, and that it works remarkably well, is a testimony to Cardinal’s talent. Similarly, S.A. Cosby’s “The Loyalty of Hungry Dogs” starts feeling like a scene from one of the great post-apocalyptic books in literature, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, including the overgrown rural home of survivors and a mysterious but obviously Not-Good-News shed behind the house, and armed marauders willing to kill over the contents of a small garden, before becoming something altogether different. Half a continent away, V. Castro’s “Asylum” tells the story of how the Cartels came to power, defeating a particularly horrifying disease and watching the United States fall, in part because of their inhumanity at the border. Told conversationally, the story packs a complete speculative history, moving from individual stakes to the full ramifications of the geo-political rebalancing without ever forgetting those who died because of US policy.

  

Other standouts in “Lockdown” include Eryk Pruitt’s “Herd Immunity”, another second person story in which a young man visits a cult compound, “The Seagull & the Hog” in which a frustrated man loses his mind to the sounds of his neighbor’s constant copulation and undertakes what might be a suicide mission for new material to masturbate to, Hector Acosta’s “Por Si Adoso” which examines a food delivery racket, and the trouble poor kids trying to make cash for themselves in a new world find themselves in when they come in contact with the upper class, and “Lockdown” editor Nick Kolakowski’s “A Kinder World Stands Before Us” in which a former Michelin starred chef finds himself cooking for the world’s most vapid and useless collection of Tech CEOs, moguls, and ultra-wealthy before their source runs out and the 1% rapidly devolve into procuring other means for their own survival. 

That an anthology edited by Steve Weddle and Nick Kolakowski has so many great stories shouldn’t be a surprise; Weddle edited Needle, one of the seminal crime fiction journals of recent years, and Kolakowski is fresh off a multi-year tenure helping shape young writers as an editor at the long running Shotgun Honey website. Unfortunately, however, not every story in “Lockdown” is excellent. A couple of stories seem out of place or rushed, or do not fit the broader theme of the anthology as a whole, including a couple of the later stories, one of which would be better described as post-apocalyptic sci-fi, which features almost no mention of a lockdown or viral outbreak at all, and certainly no thematic or plot relevance to the thematics of the wider anthology.

  

Though there are stumbles, none are so bad as to make “Lockdown: Stories of Crime, Terror, and Hope During a Pandemic” anything other than very, very, good. “Lockdown” is a varied, thoughtful, imaginative anthology that offers more than just crime or horror or sci-fi, but instead a mix of all of the above. Though not perfect, it is considerably better than most other anthologies and if it were not for being spread across so many genres, I would expect it to be nominated for several awards. Perfect not just for reading while in lockdown, but also, when this is all over, as a document of where we were at this moment, “Lockdown”, full of rage, sadness, and humor, excels at showing the humanity of everyone who may be or become infected, and casts a light on the systems that shrug indifferently at death. 

Paul J. Garth has been published in Thuglit, Needle: A Magazine of Noir, Plots with Guns, Crime Factory, Tough, and several other anthologies and web magazines. He lives and writes in Nebraska, where he lives with his family. An editor at Shotgun Honey, he is at work on his first novel, and can be found online by following @pauljgarth on Twitter.

 

Worse Angels, by Laird Barron, reviewed by Thomas Pluck

Print Length: 335 pages

Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0593084993

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons (May 26, 2020)

Publication Date: May 26, 2020

Here’s something real: Don’t buy the jive about violence as a last resort because I’m better than that. No. Violence is only a last resort when it’s a last resort. Realistically, it’s often a first, second, or middle resort. The Superflys of the world speak the language fluently. Besides, hitting a jerk feels good. It has to feel good, or else I wouldn’t be able to stomach it. That dopamine rush I’d gotten addicted to in the Outfit was difficult to kick, so I weaned myself slowly.

Crime and horror have been bedfellows since the beginning, when Edgar Allan Poe murdered a character in the Rue Morgue. Marketers split us apart for easier fleecing in the 20th century, but we had Charlie Huston, Elizabeth Hand, George C. Chesbro’s Mongo the Magnificent taking an abrupt dive into mad science with the infamous Beasts of Valhalla, and William Hjortsberg’s masterpiece of Faustian deviltry, Falling Angel (adapted into the film Angel Heart, but the book is even better).

A few years ago, cosmic horror maestro Laird Barron burst onto the crime scene with Blood Standard, the first Isaiah Coleridge novel, starring the half-Maori half-white hitman turned dirty-handed investigator in the blasted landscape of upstate New York. He followed that more traditional P.I. tale with the Pynchonesque government operator-serial killer story Black Mountain, and in the third and latest, Worse Angels, he takes us on a Lynchian dive into small-town corruption and modern blood cults that makes God is a Bullet seem like middle-class tourism in the underbelly.


The story is set plunk in the genre’s bailiwick. A young man working on a now-abandoned supercollider project run by two powerful local dynasties took a Peter Pan into the shaft four years ago, but his mother refuses to believe it was suicide. And her bad cop brother-in-law is off the force and wants to hurt the politician who betrayed him, so he hires Coleridge to dig into the covered-up death of his nephew, Sean Pruitt. As Coleridge explores the ruins of the project and the creepy town left in economic shambles with its closure, the bleak mountains and dark, enveloping forests of Horseheads, New York:

The town was named for the herd of sick and injured packhorses slaughtered upon General John Sullivan’s return from his triumphant campaign in the north against the Iroquois Nations in 1779. Natives lined the road with the skulls. Over two centuries later they referred to the area as the Valley of the Horses’ Heads.

A place where “Christianity and the old gods dance hip-to-hip during the witching season” will ring familiar to anyone who’s explored the towns of New England and come upon a pumpkin festival that locals pshaw-pshaw as old hat, but looks like the end of The Wicker Man to outsiders. But Coleridge runs into worse than ziggurats of jack-o’lanterns like glowing skulls on his investigation in Horseheads. The town is owned by the billionaire Redlick family, led by a Senator patriarch, with a creepy, marionette PR man named Tom Mandibole as its face and right hand. Our first encounter with Mandibole and his Lynchian street gang of meat-gnawing pancake-make-up thugs in cheerleader skirts and varsity jackets is chilling and strange:

The goons and the Mares were far less of a concern than the master of ceremonies himself. He impressed me as a spider, coiled and alert, poised to spring upon its prey. “What lurks in the darkness of interstellar space? The interstellar reaches of our souls? Terror.” Mandibole reclined, motionless, hands in plain view, yet his whisper emanated behind my left ear. Then, louder, “The emotion you’re experiencing. It’s terror. Terror ruled the indigenous tribes of the Valley. Terror motivated the white colonists. Of course, men fear the wilderness, the natural features of the land. That’s why men deface it at every opportunity—burn it, bulldoze it, hack it to stumps, and pound it to gravel. They desire clear lines of sight.”

I disliked how he said “they” in reference to humanity.

Coleridge is a hardcore skeptic, a Scully who cracks skulls. He’s experienced much that he can’t explain, but his sanity is kept in check by his ability to rationalize the world around him. Someone from a world of uncanny killers and powerful men who live by the fear they generate is the perfect investigator in a world where what matters is belief. If the boss isn’t pure evil, why not just whack him? If you have big enough ju-ju, you might survive. Barron played his cards very close to his chest in Black Mountain, which involved MKULTRA and CIA research into mind control and hallucinogens, and how such tools became lethal in the hands of a psychopath called The Croatoan. In this novel he is more confident that readers will accept occasional forays into the mythos he’s built over decades of award-winning short stories and the Pynchonesque thriller The Croning, even if his protagonist does not. And it works.

He doesn’t play games with our expectations or deny us satisfaction with smoke and mirrors:

The drive back to town blurred. My attention was repeatedly drawn to the rearview mirror. I experienced a “watched” feeling I’d sometimes picked up on in the Alaskan boonies. That very real sense the land itself wants you gone. Her immune system too reacts to perceived threats by sending agents after you— wolves, bears, blizzards, men deranged by cabin fever, anything handy. What kind of antibodies did this part of the country have at its disposal? Mate a genius locus with a partially constructed supercollider and gods only knew the result.

The supercollider, a quantum Ourobouros buried beneath the bedrock, its hypermagnetism twisting what lies above like the toxic fumes of a SuperFund site, is both symbol and actual as the altar and object of worship for which people will perform blood sacrifice, for both what it brings, and what it represents. When the Large Hadron collider was turned on, we held our collective breath that it wouldn’t create a micro-black hole and crush us and the planet like diamond in a titan’s fist. The architects behind this one have other things in mind, an apocalypse to save us from our own naïveté and curiosity as we cry out “Ollie Ollie Oxen Free” into the great void and hope what hears us is friendly. This leads to an inevitable confrontation where our aging anti-hero may become the next sacrificial victim.

Coleridge is great company, a Warrior Poet who waxes violent when need be, and doesn’t try to baffle us with philosophical bullshit. He knows what he is, a killer, and he has turned his instincts into a living that those around him can tolerate. Laird Barron has given us my favorite new crime series, one that flirts with unanswerable questions best asked on dark nights under cold stars, but never loses sight that crime and violence are always matters of blood and the heart.

Thomas Pluck has slung hash, worked on the docks, trained in martial arts in Japan, and even swept the Guggenheim museum (but not as part of a clever heist). He is the author of the Jay Desmarteaux crime thriller Bad Boy Boogie, which was nominated for an Anthony award, and the story collection Life During Wartime, which includes "Deadbeat," chosen as a Distinguished Mystery Story of 2017 in The Best American Mystery Stories

Chaser, by Dharma Kelleher, reviewed by Rider Barnes

Dharma Kelleher

Chaser

310 pages

Pariah Press

$15.99

Dharma Kelleher’s Chaser is a hell of a good time. It follows Jinx Ballou, a bounty hunter living in Phoenix, Arizona. Throughout the book, she tracks down her skips, all while dealing with Chechen mobsters, her boyfriend’s shady past, and perhaps most importantly: being outed as transgender. The resulting book is a thrill.

The book opens with a standard job for Jinx, but shortly after being outed, she is blacklisted by her bail bond agency, leaving her one option for work. She has five days to hunt down Holly Schwartz, a seventeen-year-old disabled girl, who was recently charged with the murder of her mother. Following her trail leads Jinx into the sight of Milo Volkov, a Chechen mobster and sex trafficker who develops a discomforting obsession with Jinx after she disrupts an FBI sting operation in one of his bases of operation.

Jinx herself is an entertaining character, with elements of the average crime protagonist, but with several refreshing, humanizing qualities. ““According to the map, the cabin should be a mile ahead on the left.” Tree branches scraped the side of the Gray Ghost, like fingernails on a chalkboard. So much for my new paint job.” Her evening might be occupied by chasing criminals, but she cosplayed Wonder Woman the previous morning. She practices parkour and krav maga, but she drives an old Nissan Pathfinder. She is a fully fleshed-out character, and while I know that Kelleher has since written more books from her perspective, if I didn’t, I would still have been immediately aware of Jinx’s series potential. In the very first chapters, I could see the potential for continued bounty hunting.

At first, I struggled with the cinematic nature of the book, as most of my experience with the crime genre comes from the noir or hardboiled side of things, with gritty realism taking more of a center stage. However, as I read on, I thought about it. How many cinematic trans characters can you think of? Did they get a happy ending? Was it even a positive portrayal? I certainly couldn’t think of any characters like that. The underrepresentation of the LGBT+ community in fiction is familiar discussion, but it stands repeating that the more positive representation we have, the better. I am not so naive as to believe that well written, positive portrayals of LGBT+ characters, like we find in Chaser, will end bigotry, but every little bit helps.

The book keeps you primed, eager to see the conclusion. While Jinx’s interactions with her family and friends were often my favorite parts of the book, the action scenes, acrobatic chases and lightning-fast gunfights, were always just plain fun.

“I ducked as a burst of automatic gunfire shook the air. Bullets rattled the fence and ricocheted off the back wall. I turned and saw two other guards shooting at us. I pulled off three shots at one guard, hitting him in the neck and chest. I aimed at the other and was about to pull the trigger when his head whipped back in a cloud of gore as Conor brought him down with his Bushmaster.”

Kelleher expertly weaves multiple plot threads together, yet never makes any of them feel less important than the others, which makes the book evenly enjoyable throughout. The worst part of some stories can be the pacing, with a great beginning and end held down by a sluggish middle. Not Chaser, though.

Ultimately, Dharma Kelleher’s Chaser is a fun book, which is often the best thing to ask for. It deftly foregrounds LGBT+ issues, while delivering with tension and the release of that tension in a crime novel. Well written and well paced, it’s easy to devour, and leaves you eager for the next book in the series. The ending was satisfying, and sets clear routes to sequels, that I very much look forward to reading.

Rider Barnes is a writer from Revere, Massachusetts and Associate Editor at Tough. This is his first publication.

A Wind of Knives, by Ed Kurtz, reviewed by Rusty Barnes

Ed Kurtz
A Wind of Knives
7.99/2.99
74 pages
independently published


Ed Kurtz's A Wind of Knives, in many ways, a traditional revenge story,. Daniel Hays awakens one day to the horrifying sight of his hired man, Steven, body bloody and mutilated, hanged by the neck and dead. He vows revenge, but not only for the reasons you might think. Steven had been his hired man, yes, but also his lover. The novella that follows is Daniel's long journey to vengeance and a muted, odd sort of peace.

Kurtz is a fine and sensitive writer, first. His words, even as a horror writer primarily, and perhaps more accustomed to showing all the gore that comes with death and dismemberment, never seem to outstrip what they're saying. "Steven's left eye stared glassily; Daniel pushed the eyelid down with his thumb, but it popped back open." The language is always in service to the story, almost invisible, guiding us along through the grim events with a firm hand and steady influence, even as his strict attention to rich and specific detail reveals horrifying sights, from the dead man's eyes refusing to close to a man rising from his gravedirt with a burst of ghoulish energy and a worm in his pocket.

The plot of the book is pretty straightforward. Daniel follows what clues he has--not many--to a group of men who are responsible for something evil. Daniel's unsure if that something includes Steven's death, though, and he follows some leads and gets off-track. He meets an array of characters, along the way, men and women who love him. They help him and thwart him to varying degrees, their actions always reflecting Daniel and Steven's relationship, giving us more insight into why Steven's death is so traumatic. That death never leaves Daniel's mind, and when finally confronted with the most monstrous of evils, Steven's killer, finds resolution only in a muted way. the ending resonating in true noir fashion: there's a way for the losers in the world. They rarely see victory in the ways they'd like.

What drives me to read is discovering writers like Kurtz, in whose hands we're capably guided through places we'd rather not go to ends we don't expect. I imagine this was even rarer when the novella first came out. I can't think of many--any?--bisexual characters in the western genre, or very often in genres beyond, and the re-release of this book proves even more fully that we need writers like Kurtz to show us the way. Writers like him are in short supply, good,indelible writers especially and this book is a trailbreaker in all the best ways.


I took this review and cashed in on an opportunity to ask Kurtz a few questions which shed some late on the genesis of A Wind of Knives, which I trust will be as interesting to you as they were to me.

What were your influences in writing A Wind of Knives?

I’m a tremendous fan of Western fiction from Louis L’Amour to Larry McMurtry, and I read scads of Western novels every year, but with extremely few exceptions one doesn’t see much in the way of marginalized and underrepresented protagonists. It’s a straight, white, cis-male world for the large part, with a handful of token Native and African-American characters along the way, but LGBTQ? Forget it! So in that sense, I didn’t really have an influence, apart from wanting to write a sort of anti-heroic, anti-revenge, anti-Western that is, at its core and heart, a love story.

What attracted you to the western to tell this particular story? Were you put off at all by the limited readership?

I wasn’t at all put off by the limited readership because the moment I conceptualized the story, I knew that would be the case. Readers interested in Westerns overwhelmingly aren’t going to be interested in queer content, and vice versa. It’s an uninspiring Venn diagram for a writer like me! But I’m a bisexual Western fan hailing from Arkansas with a particular kind of experience and particular stories I wanted to tell, so it had to be this one, whether it got read or not.

I'm trying to imagine the writing and original publication arc for this book and it seems as if it would have been a daunting process. Can you talk a little about the writing process for it and then how you managed to find a publisher for something seemingly so niche-oriented?

Originally, I wanted to write a full-length novel that charts the course of the two men’s relationship over multiple lifetimes, but as I closed in on the end of A Wind of Knives, I decided this was the story, full stop. What I ended up with was almost impossible to sell – a 20,000 word queer Western. No one wanted it, under a very small publisher, Snubnose Press, took it on. It was well-reviewed, but barely sold. Then the press went out of business and the book remained out of print for years. I tried again and again to interest agents, publishers, etc. in what I deem my very best work, but it was just too hard a sell for all of them. Ultimately, I reissued it myself. It still barely sells, and I’m still unsurprised. But it’s still my very favorite thing I have ever written, and certainly the closest to my heart. I no longer write or publish (though there’s at least one more novel yet to release on the horizon), so in retrospect, A Wind of Knives is what I’m most proud of.

Dirty Old Town, by Gabriel Valjan, reviewed by Rusty Barnes

Dirty Old Town
Gabriel Valjan
Level Best Books
$15.95/5.99
172 pages
reviewed by Rusty Barnes

Dirty Old Town, a short novel by Gabriel Valjan, is a slick tribute to a bygone time as well as being a cracking good detective story. It's 1975, and private detective Shane Cleary's life in Boston's South End is grim. Besides his cat Delilah, there's little companionship, and not a lot going on. In the hardboiled tradition, Cleary's wallet is thin and his prospects few, but a late night phone call from rich old chum Brayton Braddock serves to get Cleary's engines firing. And to complicate matters, Shane and Brayton Braddock's wife Cat have a complicated history.

It turns out that Braddock is getting blackmailed, and he wants Cleary to find out who's doing it. The problem centers around real estate dealings that, while not quite illegal, could serve to complicate matters for the development of downtown Boston and the suits on Beacon Hill, and indeed involve shadow groups of people--largely rich, largely insulated--who come from the upper crust of Boston's social scene and depend on those shadows to hide their complicity in all manner of things, as Cleary discovers.

Thus are we thrust into a ripped-from-the-screens '70s cinema feel novel, without a touch of nostalgic haze. From the CITGO sign to the Wonderland dog track ,, you can feel the wind in your face as Valjan's prose takes Cleary down Tremont Street toward the Little Building. This is a book with an uncommon feel for and love of the city, and it's a damned fun time. All the Boston trappings are there, from the battles between the Irish and the Italians for control of the underground to the omnipresent roots of the project that would become the Big Dig, transforming Boston's downtown in an emblem of greed and green alike.

Cleary is a worthy character indeed, with his own colorful history and a life he brings to bear on the complicated messes he finds himself in. Like Spenser and Patrick Kenzie before him, he brings a mordant humor and not-quite-a-tough-guy ease to his role. He's completely credible as someone with enough brawn and streetsmarts to make his way through Boston in pursuit of the bad ones, mobsters and police alike ticking at his heels looking for him to slip up just once.

Secondary characters reveal themselves well, like former professor Delano Lindsey, stolid-but-gay police officer Bill and his closeted partner, as well as Mr. Butch, street performer in Kenmore Square, all are lovingly and aptly detailed in prose that never goes off-track and always serves the story. Describing a ride from the South End to Beacon Hill in the dead of night:

Minimal traffic. Not a word from him or me during the ride. Boston goes to sleep at 12:30 a.m. Public transit does its last call at that hour. Checkered hacks scavenge the streets for fares in those small hour hours before sunrise. The other side of the city comes alive then, before the rest of the town awakes, before whatever time Mr. Coffee hits the filters and grounds. While men and women who slept until an alarm clock sprung them forward into another day, another repeat of their daily routine, the sitcom of their lives, all for the hallelujah of a paycheck, another set of people moved, with their ties yanked down, shirts and skirts unbuttoned, and tails pulled up and out. The night life, the good life, was on.

Valjan is a man who you can trust to take you for a ride with the smooth forward propulsion of his prose. He fits in well with the city's rich literary array of crime writers, and stakes his claim among them. One of the abiding pleasures of the reading life is coming across characters so well-written, so well-worn in their own bodies it seems as if they've always existed. Shane Cleary is one of them, and if we're lucky, we'll hear much more from him in the future, and perhaps in other projects from Gabriel Valjan, who proves with this book that there is much more life to the PI novel in Boston than might have been imagined.

Lightwood, by Steph Post, reviewed by Jay Gertzman

Lightwood

By Steph Post

Polis Books

302 pp.

$15.99

Reviewed by Jay A Gertzman

Steph Post is a prime candidate for renown in her genre. The comparison that comes to mind is with David Joy. His Where All Light Tends to Go (Putnam’s, 2015) is similar to Post’s Lightwood in precisely reported setting, tough but conflicted characters, dead mothers, sustaining and/or hindering loved ones, help from unexpected places, injured self-respect, a need for adventure, and bloodletting reaching toward Grand Guignol depths. In addition to all these rudiments of 20^th-century pulp noir, both writers give their protagonists’ struggles for independence from community and family ties an almost biblical intensity. Maybe that helps explain the similarity in their names, Judah and Jacob.

Judah Cannon’s surname reflects Genesis 29:35. Judah (“praise”), was a founder of a new family line; his father was Jacob; King David and Christ were descendants. Post’s Judah—when we first meet him—is in no such position, because he is too loyal to the values he has received growing up in Silas, a hardscrabble Florida town that has been stagnant for a generation. Empty storefronts, weekend assignations, and weaponry stockpiled for the End of Days reflect resignation to a moral code that, in its strictly enforced absolutism, has become shabby. For example, Judah has stayed helpful to his estranged, contemptuous wife, and to his bullying father, because he has been taught men do not abandon family. Unlike his girlfriend Ramey, he has not learned to prioritize self-respect over self-defeating obligation. Thus, he accepts his wife’s demand that he not see their child.

Post’s themes preclude backgrounding the dignity of rural Americans’ creative perseverance, as do not only Breece Pancake, Chris Offutt (Kentucky Straight), Bonnie Jo Campbell (American Salvage), and Carolyn Chute, but also Martin McDonagh in his film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. In contrast, Ramey and Judah make a stark contrast to their fellow citizens in Silas, whose beaten-down resignation is evident in their TV binging, their heavy drinking, and their need for firearms to protect their property.

Judah had just finished a 3-year prison sentence, taking the rap for a Cannon family theft from the Scorpions, a slap-dash and vicious gang of bikers dealing in cocaine. His father, Sherwood, has told him, “without family, you got nothing. But with family, you got everything. . . .” He said this “with a dangerous scowl,” one people have learned is a dire warning.

Judah’s younger brother, Benji, has not become embittered or resentful. He has an easy-going friendliness. He takes after his mother. (Her death, like that of Joy’s protagonist’s, produced a grief both men must bury; the pain still eats at them and possibly is a factor in their fathers’ cruelty.) Benji is dragged to the point of death by the Scorpions to scare Sherwood into giving back the drug money (which of course does not happen). At this point Judah confesses his guilt for Benji’s near-fatal torture. “I went along with it, again.” He states this in a public place. Why would he do that? To survive any crisis takes self-respect. That comes as a result of confidence, which in turn comes with experience. Where do you learn those traits, in an isolated small town, where your own father and brother stop you from doing so, and beat the crap out of you if you start to? “Stupid, cowardly worm, who can’t even think for himself.” Now he starts to.

Judah’s unaccustomed outburst endangers Sherwood’s plans. He’s growing up, and Sherwood and his brother Levi pound him bloody for it. Ramey, who Sherwood admits “has some balls” (interesting but unlikely observation), helps by pulling a gun to stop the beating. One trait of noir literature is trust and courage emerging from unlikely places.

Ramey and Judah not only sleep together; they dream together, of an independent future, one where the strengths of rural life can revive out of the coffin of obedience to authorities like Sherwood. Judah must find the clue to how to channel his ability to think for himself into independence of heart and soul. Ramey has already done so. “She was … desperately trying to be the woman her own mother never had the courage to be.” “I’ve always been my own. But I think,” she tells Judah, “we carry a part of each other. Always have. Always will.” What she will never do is become a brittle, disposable object such as lightwood.

A prime noir characteristic is extreme violence. That is provided not only by what happens to Benji, but by a Grand Guignol all by herself, Sister Tulah, fire and brimstone preacher with a captive congregation she terrifies with starvation, sensory overload, and demands for tithes they dare not withhold. It’s as if she has emerged as the ultimate monster that Sherwood and the bikers had unwittingly conjured up from hell. Her weird pale eyes hide an essential emptiness of the least drop of humanity. She fears only snakes, I suppose in deference to her boss, Satan. He is the only one, she might think, powerful enough to make her suffer as she has done to her own acolytes.

I don’t know of many similar characters in contemporary rural noir. I think of Jim Thompson’s deformed Ruthie in Savage Night, who leads Little Bigger, hit man extraordinaire, to a death that “tastes good.” The shack where it all goes down, way down, has a sign in the yard: “The way of the transgressor is hard.”

Sherwood and Tula have to work together to find the stolen money. It is needed by a phosphate corporation to bribe local politicians. In a powerful denouement, securing that money becomes Sherwood’s baptism of fire. Tulah remains. Judah and Ramey wind up with the filthy lucre his father has accumulated. On to Walk in the Fire. Obviously, fire has many implications, both hellish and cleansing.

Post’s novel exemplifies a fascinating contrast between classic and contemporary noir. In the former, those who, like Bigger in Savage Night, or Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me, embrace absolute megalomaniacal control end in literal fire. It tastes good, or they laugh. (For another scary example, see Charles Williams’ The Hot Spot). Protagonists in Woolrich, Goodis, Gil Brewer, Margaret Millar, Dorothy Hughes, and Charles Williford bind themselves to a malevolent fate they can only stoically accept. While the difficulties of forging satisfying human connections are clear in rural noir, the possibilities of securing mutuality can be realized, and enjoyed. Perseverance is fulfilling, not simply the mark of a noble loser. So it is in Woodrell, Bonnie Campbell, Denis Johnson, Larry Brown, and Steph Post. Its radical nature has everything to do with cleansing.

Jay Gertzman is the author of Pulp, According to David Goodis, which was nominated for best non-fiction study of the mystery genre for 2019. A Prof Emeritus at Mansfield University, his specialties are literary censorship, the publisher Samuel Roth, and 20^th century  mass market pulp crime fiction.

HELLBENDERS: Jordan Farmer's The Pallbearer

art by Patrick Weck

Welcome to the first installment of an ongoing series of reviews, written by Gonzalo Baeza: HELLBENDERS. Hellbenders are the unloved stepchildren of the salamander world, native to Pennsylvania and West Virginia and other places, squat-faced and dirty-looking and ugly-beautiful. If you've ever had the chance to see one up close, chances are you haven't forgotten it. They are rare. So too, are the books on which Tough was predicated: rural noir and crime, often ugly, often beautiful, in such settings as various as Maine and New Hampshire, Appalachia and many parts of the rural South and West.

While hellbenders in the wild are much more difficult to find than a quality rural noir--though still a rare beast--we aim to help out the cause. HELLBENDERS will review books new and old, stories that got missed by the major book review venues or were otherwise overlooked as untimely and/or unappreciated. We'll take a look at the past, watch out for the future, and poke through the rocks and silt in search of the good stuff, the rare stuff, the HELLBENDERS.

The Pallbearer

Jordan Farmer 

Skyhorse Publishing

268pgs

978-1-5107-3651-1

$24.99/$16.99

Reviewed by Gonzalo Baeza

Given the number of new titles released each week and the little to no promotion most new books get these days, especially when they are not issued by a big publisher, it is no wonder that a remarkable novel like Jordan Farmer’s The Pallbearer has not gotten the attention it deserves. A darkly poetic rural noir set in the dying coal town of Lynch, West Virginia, this first novel may appear to tread familiar territory explored by writers like Breece D’J Pancake and Ron Rash, but it does so with its own mix of lyrical and propulsive prose and an unorthodox cast of compelling characters. 

The pallbearer in question is Jason Felts, who used to work in his family’s mortuary in downtown Lynch. He still lives in an apartment above the old family business but it’s not just physical proximity to the funeral home that cements his ties to death and tragedy: Felts is a counsellor at the violent Shelby Youth Correctional Facility –known as “The Shell”– where many of Lynch’s and the region’s young men end up as coal prospects dwindle, businesses close, and opioids abound. 

As seen through Felts’ eyes, “There was no opportunity left in the hills. With the mines shutting down there wouldn’t be much left of Lynch in ten years anyway. Just empty storefronts and the few families left behind without jobs, becoming more isolated as the economy collapsed. Jason guessed everyone would pull up stakes eventually or be forced into the regression of a frontier barter system and poaching.” 

Counsellors have a hard time getting through to the troubled inmates, including one minor called Malcolm, whose constant outbursts of rage maintain the staff on edge, ready to restrain him as they wait for the boy to be transferred to a more adequate psychiatric facility in Ohio. Work is even more difficult for Felts considering he is a dwarf and his appearance is derided by both inmates and prison guards. 

Two new arrivals to The Shell upend Felts’ life and unleash a series of ever more gruesome events. One is Huddles, the younger brother of local crime boss Ferris Gilbert. Huddles is incarcerated after a nocturnal drug run goes wrong and a state trooper confiscates Ziploc bags of pills and guns from his vehicle. The local sheriff, who is trying to get to Ferris, makes it clear to Huddles that he can either inform on his brother or he’ll make sure that the younger Gilbert remains detained until trial. He should then expect to be transferred to an even more violent jail where his family name carries no weight and he’ll be easy prey for the older inmates. 

Huddles spends the days either meditating to mentally escape his surroundings or reading a novel he finds in The Shell’s library, Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. A recurring theme in West’s novel from the 1930s is the disappointment of those who live in the fringes of Hollywood, unable to accomplish their dreams, “the people who come to California to die” and whose eyes are “filled with hatred.” Huddles’ fascination with the book is likely explained by the despair he sees in his surroundings but also by the unfulfilled potential of his own life.    

The other arrival is Terry Blankenship, a strung-out teenager who is arrested for breaking into one of Lynch’s many dilapidated houses to steal pills. He lives in a rundown hunting cabin with his boyfriend after being kicked out of his home by his homophobic father. Blankenship also owes money to Ferris Gilbert who, seizing upon the young man’s despair, offered him an out: kill the sheriff and all debts will be forgiven. 

Both Terry and Huddles look at Ferris with suspicion. Huddles cannot imagine a relationship that is not transactional and in his particularly laconic and defensive way he questions the counsellor’s offer of help: “You know, everyone I’ve talked to, they want to carve their slice.” 

Terry is even more mistrustful, being marginalized in Lynch both because of his addiction and his sexuality: “Terry didn’t confide in anyone, (…) but as much as he wanted free of these secrets, he understood burdens were a way of life and no venting, whether to holy idols or equally broken men could lift them from your back. Why this universal need for communion anyway? Seeking solace in another only created a false hope that you’d be understood. People pretended because it was too hard to admit we’re each trapped in our own shell, using imprecise words to try to express something unsayable.” 

A counsellor whose appearance has made him an outcast, an addict who hides too many secrets, a reluctant member of a crime family who feels the need to prove his toughness both to the inmates and to his brother. Their respective baggage enhances their outsider nature but never in a truculent manner. Farmer is a skilled writer who carefully builds each character so that their struggles –and their pain– feel real and more than a collection of misfortunes and arbitrary psychological traits. All three of them fight to survive under the shadow of the looming, almost feral presence of Ferris Gilbert, but also amid a ravaged landscape with its striated mountains stripped of their last ounce of coal. 

The Pallbearer is an accomplished and emotive first novel that reads like the work of an experienced author, its well-worn characters, evocative prose, and sustained tension creating a pungent mix of pure West Virginia rawness.

Gonzalo Baeza is a writer born in Texas, raised in Chile, and currently living in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. His books have been published in the U.S., Spain and Chile, and his fiction has appeared in Boulevard, Goliad, Estados Hispanos de América, Tintas, and The Texas Review, among others. 

Laird Barron's Black Mountain, reviewed by Paul J. Garth

Black Mountain

Laird Barron

G.P Putnam's Sons

$26.00

Reviewed by Paul J. Garth

There are several scenes in Black Mountain, Laird Barron’s second crime novel, that see the protagonist of Barron’s series, Isaiah Coleridge, reflecting on a life lived in the shadow of inescapable death. The Shade has always been waiting, Coleridge recollects deathsheads and cosmic gloom as constant parts of his life.Through the course of these recollections, peppered throughout this gloriously plotted, violent, and fascinating novel,  Isaiah reveals he’s done what most men cannot: instead of attempting to escape the shadow of death, he’s felt himself drawn to it. In Alaska, Coleridge’s former home before a mob-enforced exile, the two were joined as seamlessly as night falling over a distant, darkened peak.
When we first met Coleridge, in last year’s Blood Standard, this past before exile from the Outfit was only hinted at, shown in asides tossed between mobsters and mentors, quips made to button men, white supremacists, and mercs who had made the mistake of trying to intimidate Isaiah while his feet were still wet in a new setting, but the genuine weight of Coleridge’s past experience was mostly mentioned in asides or as window dressing to let you know how dangerous Coleridge could be. Blood Standard is a good book, a haymaker introduction to a wonderfully complex, caring, yet hostile new character operating in a non-traditional location, written by one of the last decade’s most exciting writers. Like Isaiah, however, there were times when it felt as though there was a component missing, some piece of the puzzle that had not yet been formed and placed. In short, it was very close to the book readers had imagined when they heard Laird Barron was trying his hand at writing noir novels, but not quite the whole.
Black Mountain changes that. In Black Mountain, all the pieces cohere, and Barron places each one meticulously, including some new ones, revealing something exciting, elemental, dark, and formidable. Black Mountain, in a just world, would put the rest of the crime fiction world on notice.
Set close to real time, Black Mountain sees Coleridge, still off his game by a step or two after working through the investigation in Blood Standard, hanging out a shingle as a PI. When his former associatescome to Coleridge looking for help tracking down who might be responsible for a made man ending up headless in a local lake, Coleridge takes the case.  Through his investigation, Coleridge is thrown into a shadowy world of almost mythological hit-men, sinister corporations (including one that longtime Barron fans will relish seeing again), mob politics, femme fatales, bloodthirsty mercenaries, and dysfunctional families.
In lesser hands, Black Mountain could read like something overly familiar, a mix between Red Dragon and a Quarry novel, perhaps, but Barron eschews cheap plot twists and the know structures of the genre, preferring to take the story to new, stranger territory. That Coleridge’s ensuing search for answers is expertly plotted and ultimately leads to dark truths will not be a surprise for anyone who has previously read Barron, but what may be surprising is how organic and natural the investigation is. Isaiah Coleridge is not a trained detective, and he is certainly not a detective with enough experience to find someone even the FBI has spent years looking for, but he is tenacious, and he knows how to make people talk. Add in a deep personal insight into others and a doomed sense of self, and you’re left with a fantastically unique, even more deeply fleshed out protagonist in his second outing, one more comfortable with animal cunning than any kind of traditional investigative logic to lead him to the next inevitable step. Again, in less skilled hands, this would feel like a cheat, a series character being right because the plot demands it, but Barron is better than that. On occasion, he lets Coleridge fail or be wrong (this seems to be a theme with Barron and Coleridge--the fallibility of the investigator--that some may find off putting but others will think lends a level of authenticity to the proceedings). By working the clues and relying on his confidants, including an FBI agent who passes along critical but confounding information, Coleridge soon finds himself in the middle of a conspiracy both larger than most presented in noir fiction, and also one that is much more deadly: The Croatoan, Coleridge’s quarry, is ruthless, brilliant, and, the wiseguys whisper, potentially supernatural. A serial killer created by private corporations and the alphabet soup of nameless government agencies, the Croatoan is literally pulled from the innards of the earth, and just as Coleridge is hunting him, the Croatoan hunts Coleridge.
     The plot of Black Mountain is fast-moving, intricate, expansive, and mysterious, but the major achievement of the novel is the atmosphere Barron creates, infecting the reader with some of Coleridge’s own sense of predetermined cosmic doom. The prose in Blood Standard was good, but it sometimes felt as though it had been muted or toned down, focusing more on birthing Coleridge’s voice than the prose style Barron was previously known for, but in Black Mountain, the two elements have been joined beautifully,  establishing both a mood for the novel, an outlook for Coleridge, a sense of dangerous psychogeography with the setting, and a cold and brutal sense of impending death for everyone involved. Take, for example, the following scene, in which Coleridge investigates a warehouse in which the Croatoan might have worked decades before:

Hush prevailed as I moved inward and reached a set of doors marked RECEIVING. Old, old metal doors with metal handles. The left door was painted crimson, the right black, and, to either side, brick walls pallid as a dirty eggshell. The doors had been frequently repainted; a detail that inexplicably heightened my disquiet. Whatever had transpired in this area in the ‘60s and ‘70s lingered as a dim, psychic taint.  

All the above paints a picture of Black Mountain as a grim, death-obsessed book, but though the novel is made up of those elements, and though they are thematically necessary, such a picture would not fully capture Black Mountain as it is, as, amongst all the darkness, there are moments of light, as well. The supporting cast of the Isaiah Coleridge novels was perfect from the beginning, but they take on new life here, including shading Coleridge’s sidekick, Lionel, who, though he is almost as dangerous as Coleridge frequently behaves like a funny lovelorn teen; Devlin, a precocious kid who lights up the proceedings;  Meg, Coleridge’s girlfriend, who delights in Coleridge and whose affection for him is contagious, yet she still relishes giving him a hard time;  and an ever-evolving set of mobsters and wiseguys,  all of whom seem to be as interested in throwing zingers as they are making money, committing crimes, and figuring out who killed their compatriots. In addition, there are scenes with Coleridge that move from blackly humorous to just flat out hilarious, including an encounter between Coleridge and a would be intimidation squad that somehow manages to be laugh out loud funny between all the gunshots and broken ribs.
Laird Barron has been writing professionally for almost two decades now, and his body of work is deep and full of incredible stories, but the move to crime fiction has given him a second life, stretching his skills and unique understanding of our world onto a genre that seems ready made for him. Asked a year ago what stories best showcased Barron’s talent, I may have replied with a long list of personal favorites: “Bulldozer”, “Hallucigenia”, “The Imago Sequence,” “The Broadsword”, “Occultation”, “--30--”, The Croning, “The Men from Porlock”, “The Redfield Girls”, “Hand of Glory”, “Andy Kaufman Creeping Through the Trees”, or “Frontier Death Song”.
     Now, the answer is simple: Black Mountain. In Isaiah Coleridge, Barron has perfected a series protagonist who, though their survival is (mostly) assured, still plumbs the depths of genuine noir. This is the book crime fiction, a genre sometimes known for treading water, needs right now. This is, so far anyway, the best series crime novel of the year.