comics I read last week

Sam & Twitch: Udaku, 1- 4

Image Comics

Two New York cops left the service to become private investigators, but quickly went back, when they were unable to earn as freelancers a minimum. Sam and Twitch, however, behave more like private detectives: Very Dark City (and the action takes place there, rather than in New York) has some sort of police problem, since Sam and Twitch are working on their own, only obeying coroner and no one more. Lieutenant of the two detectives has been found with his head severed in the basement, God rest his soul (Lieutenant, not the basement).

For four issues announcements convince us that Sam & Twitch adjoins the Spawn universe, but we are not even close to Spawn (which can not be said about the other damn things). Bendis avoids the "bubble" dialogue, all conversations are tied by the threads to their characters.

At the end of one issue Bendis said that Sam & Twitch was inspired by a dialogue with his wife, who has seen enough of the great TV series Homicide. So the main question that arises while reading Sam & Twitch, should not sound like, "Where is Spawn?", but as «Where is Pembleton?».



The Bulletproof Coffin, 1-4

Image Comics

When life gets to you, you can use a help of a bottle of vodka, but you cango upstairs to your room and read comics. The protagonist of The Bulletproof Coffin is the owner of an unusual profession: he is Voids Contractor. After one cleaning in the hands of Steve Norman lands an unusual collection of old comic books, which actually should not even exist. These comic issues are created by David Hine and Shaky Kane, they also created The Bulletproof Coffin. Yes, it's post-modern comics. Yes, it's a kick in the ass to superhero comics.

Orientation

Daniel Orozco
Orientation

Faber & Faber, 2011


Less is better - it can be said of the collection of short stories Orientation by Daniel Orozco. Nine short stories, collected under the book cover for the first time, were published in magazines throughout the decade and a half. It happens sometimes that a writer for years publishes his short pieces in magazines and anthologies, these stories are quietly praised, but the author goes unnoticed because there is no book. Orozco has a book now, and at last we can say that we are now able to introduce to ourselves a great writer.

There is not one story here that is a bad one, among the nine of them (which is rare for the author's collection, where there are always a fly in the ointment). Orozco is not a prolific storyteller, though a skilful one. The author writes stories in the first, second and third person, playing out of genres and patterns and buys you over with humanity.

Orozco has his special relationship with humanity. His stories often do not suffer, but abound in this feature, which is usually called detachment. Orozco makes a hero of the story always outsiders. The author keeps his character from a distance, and it would have made the prose cold and inaccessible. But it does not matter how much the author is far from the character is more important how the character is close to the reader.

Orozco with detachment gains the love for the heroes of his stories. Here in «Officers Weep», written in police report style, a couple of officers, a man and a woman, ride all day responding to requests and make records, detain suspects. Orozco experiments with form and with the protocol prose (and it is in itself ridiculously funny) seeks the visible extent of the situation. But when the reports are interrupted with the emotions of officers, these emotions and feelings are at times more powerful than usually, because they are emotions in the restricted area.

«Officer [Shield # 325] approaches vehicle. Her stride longer than her legs can accommodate, she leans too much into each step, coming down hard on her heels, as if trudging through sand. As she returns to Patrol Unit, a lock of her hair - thin and drab, a lusterless, mousy brown - slips down and swings timidly across her left eye, across the left lens of her mirrored wraparounds. Officer tucks errant lock behind ear, secures it in a place with a readjustment of duty cap. Her gestures are brisk and empathic, as if she were quelling a desire to linger in the touch of her own hair. Officer [Shield # 647] observes entire intimate sequence from his position behind wheel of Patrol Unit. Officer enthralled. Officer ascertains the potential encroachment of love, maybe, into his cautious and lonely life. Officer swallows hard.»

Many of the characters in Orozco’s stories do not have names, only nicknames - Baby, the Presidente-in-Exile, Officer # - if not only "he" or "she," but even those that have names could very well be without them. The reality in Orozco’s stories is not really our reality, with seemingly recognizable signs. And the author is attentive to detail. Only in one story Orozco makes a logical error: in «Only Connect» action of the story runs into the future, which for some reason still remains present.

This Daniel Orozco has a right orientation, he should be read.

Fish Bites Cop!

David James Keaton
Fish Bites Cop!

Comet Press, 2013

What the stories by David James Keaton resemble, it is the feeling as if someone shouts something right in your face. And the shouts are not the most pleasant thing. This collection of short stories are hard to read because as a first reaction to the outcry in the face is to step back and look away, though, and you can shout something in return. But just as the reader is essentially a passive person, he can not to answer with the cry.

To not have laid ears, you’d better read Fish Bites Cop! in small portions. Keaton has gathered numerous short stories in his collection, all written over the past few years. All the stories to a more or less degree are against the authorities (and here, in addition to the cops, it is firefighters and paramedics, too), variety of genres collected here is a matter of respect. There is horror, crime, what is called weird fiction, pure realism.

Variety of genres should not confuse you in this: Keaton is experimenting not only with the plots, but mostly with style. If the short stories to cut into individual components and see what can be called a plot, we will not find there anything radically new. Humbled and humiliated student kills his school coaches. Up to his neck into debt because of a woman, a casino dealer is planning to cheat the casino, where he works, for a small amount of money. A gang of degenerates keeps surviving remnant of a small town off the water. If Keaton did not experiment with the delivery of these plots, more than half of included pieces would hardly deserve the reader's attention. But Keaton juggles stylistic devices and has thereby attracts attention to his prose. And when Keaton-fantasist and Keaton-stylist find each other, and then we have unusual, weird, amazing stories, like «Queen Excluder», «Schrödinger's Rat» or «Third Bridesmaid from the Right».

However, the same experiments sometimes harm the stories, even to complete unreadability. Keaton can be turned the wrong way, and a story, which already consists almost entirely of dialogue, becomes a mere chatter about nothing. Keaton also utilizes part of the ideas for several time, so that you can find almost the same monologues in different stories. A number of stories are half-baked in general: these are the rudiments of ideas that need more polish and editing. Bumping into weak stories in the book, you come to the conclusion that it was necessary to filter stories better. Weak stories smeared overall positive impression about the book and the author.

And it is so hard, of course, when someone shouts in the face without stopping.

comics I read last week

Let's kick off a new column with a formal review.

Eamon Espey
Songs of the Abyss

Secret Acres, 2012

The second book of Eamon Espey was released four years after the first, Wormdye. These four years we have enjoyed a reality, resting from the nightmare that Wormdye was. In Songs of the Abyss we are again immersed in the dream and see the nightmare worse than the previous one. Songs from the title of the book are a lullaby to help us fall asleep; they are also prayers for the dead to help us fall asleep forever.



Retelling other people's dreams is a vain exercise. What could see stabbed to death by his brother Abel? Death, cradling a child? A severed head in his hands of an Egyptian god? What would be a nightmare for the devil? Manna from heaven throwing off by the aliens? Lynching Santa Claus? Each page in «Songs of the Abyss» is an excerpt of another's sleep, interrupted, staccato flowing from one nightmare to another.

The book is formally divided into several parts, but inside there is no logic of our world, only dream logic. The pages of the book are populated by the same monsters, otherworldly creatures, drawn as if Espey during the making of his book held regular spiritual seances and talked personally with the evil spirits of all kinds.
Espey continues to draw maps of hell, a "hell", which is known only to him. The book is entirely made with ink, which gives it the appearance of ancient manuscripts. In ancient myths Espey seep elements of modernity: On some pages you can find a moving line, flying saucers’ aliens, cars, guns. All this seems to be alien to the ancient objects, but who said that in the nightmares cars can not be combined with devils’ rig?

At the end of the book Espey succinctly describes each page of the book. It is superfluous: the author said and did everything with his art and without words. Therefore, these descriptions can be read as poetry, and they are written like poems:

«the children are of the snake
ghost and warrior go into the elevator
the door opens and enery pours out
a phoenix emerges
inside the flame is the ocean
the whale is no longer in a bowl
he swims without constraint
in his belly joan has lived and prayed for forty nights
she cuts through the blubber with her sword of truth
water earth
sky
space»

Clandestine

James Ellroy
Clandestine

Open Road Media ebook, 2011
(originally published in 1982)

After the death of his partner Wacky Walker, a young patrolman Fred Underhill learns from newspapers about the murder of a woman with whom he once spent a night. Underhill makes a connection between the murder of Maggie Cadwallader and murder of a woman from those times when Underhill’s partner was alive. Both murders are similar in method and means, and Underhill, ambitious and in dreams of the badge of a LAPD detective, violeting the law, begins to conduct his own investigation, gradually focusing on one suspect, a womanizer and gambler Eddie Engels. Having found Maggie’s brooch in Eddie’s apartment, Underhill is convinced that Eddie is the killer. Underhill puts the collected evidence (except the brooch) to his boss, and the boss assignes the patrolman to a working group, led by an experienced detective and violent psychopath Dundee. Independent group (clandestine) of four detectives is to gather evidence against Engels, preferably by proving that, in addition to Maggie, Engels had killed several other women. But the Underhill’s plan and the work of the group leads to wrongful arrest, and Underhill loses his badge. But he will come back to the death of Maggie, a few years later.

After the stunning debut Brown's Requiem Ellroy somewhat disappoints with his second book. Clandestine is the same Brown's Requiem, only transferred 30 years in the past. The main character changed private detective license to LAPD badge, became younger and the fascination with classical music is replaced by golf. Otherwise this is all the same ambitious, narcissistic, eccentric man who dreams of conquering the world (within his means) and get the heart of one and only. Both novels even are written in the first person.

Ellroy here delivers, of course, but only sporadically. Underhill marries a woman with a prosthetic leg. In the novel appears the boy in his nine years with the growth of an adult male. Homosexual provides an alibi (and this is the fifties) for a murder suspect. Even the final denouement is logical and natural, though Underhill is not Fitz Brown, he thinks slower.

But Ellroy missed the important thing: all that has happened to Underhill in the years following his departure from the LAPD, the author packed into two chapters:

«It started getting bad with Lorna gradually, so that there was no place to look for causes and no one to blame. It was just a series of smoldering resentments. Too much giving and too much taking; too much time spent away from each other; too much investing of fantasy qualities in each other. Too much hope and too much pride and too little willingness to change.

And too much thinking on my part. Early in '54 I told Lorna that. "Our brains are a curse, Lor. I want to use my muscles and not my brain." Lorna looked up from her breakfast coffee and scratched my arm distractedly. "Then go ahead. You used to tell me 'Don't think,' remember?" »

Fred Underhill has changed a lot over the years, but in the second part of the novel after his almost divorce from his wife for some reason he is still the same. Family life of Fred and Lorna is what would amount to a novel that would probably be more complex than what happened in Clandestine.

It is sad that Ellroy has squandered his talent on self-repetition.

Point Doom

Dan Fante
Point Doom

Harper Perennial, 2013

JD Fiorella is a former private detective. Now he is 46, he lives in Los Angeles with his elderly mother, attends AA meetings and suffers from nightmares and headaches. JD’s father was a Hollywood screenwriter and a loser, but who left a million dollars in insurance. The son changed a lot of jobs, for a long time he lived in New York, where he worked as a private detective (read - a hired muscle) for the former FBI agent, but after one incident with the Russian mafia Fiorella was forced to flee from New York to Los Angeles. Then he went on a binge and then his nightmares began.
Now JD is off the sauce, and his buddy from AA meetings Woody even finds Fiorella a job – a used car salesman in the Toyota salon. But Fiorella soon finds Woody killed and decides to find the killer and avenge the death of his friend.

What a wonderful novel, and how many flaws it has! Dan Fante, son of novelist John Fante, and, importantly, a good novelist at that, takes the best from his father: hard realistic writing, attention to detail and tenacious authentic dialogue. «Point Doom» even begins in the manner of so-called realistic novel. A former alcoholic and a loser is experiencing a lot of problems and sees no way out of his dreary existence. Applying for a job of a used car salesman is right from the classics of American literature of the last century. Voice of JD Fiorella is a breathy monologue of a disaffected man who will soon turn fifty. JD is surrounded by losers like him, the former TV stars, now forgotten by all, and drunkards who are hated by even their own children (drunkurd themselves), and JD has no friends. Even about murdered Woody Fiorella realizes that Woody was not just another buddy from AA, but a true friend, only after the death of Woody.

This bitter story about a former detective with drinking problems has in itself also classic hard-boiled detective story, where the main character takes revenge for the death of a friend. Fante immediately adds elements of noir, when it becomes clear that someone decides to spoil protagonist’s life.

Needless to say that all this is read in one breath, while in the gaps you still manage to savour episodes and dialogues. But the closer to the finale, the less enthusiasm I had. Chapters in the third person with a story of a serial killer are too mechanically written, there is no charm of Fiorella’s voice. And the serial killer as a plot element reduces the level of confidence. While usually the villain is a Nazi, there it is a victim of Auschwitz becomes violent maniac. The killer, of course, is very unusual, but be that as it may, he is a serial killer who is always devoid of serious reasons to murder. And it looks funny: a detective against 80-year-old serial killer victim of Auschwitz. The last third of the book reads too much like a mediocre thriller.

Despite its shortcomings, Point Doom is a very talented book. It is hardly a serial killer novel, and rarely a book does not cause rejection, when there is a serial killer in it. For the first half the novel gets A, for the second - C, and as a result it’s B-.

Quarry/Hit Man

Lawrence Block
Hit Man

Harper Collins, 2009

Max Allan Collins
Quarry

Perfect Crime Books, 2010
(previously published as The Broker)

These two books written with a difference of more than twenty years share a common theme: both are about assassins. The formal difference between them is that Hit Man is a collection of stories linked by one character, and Quarry is a full novel, though quite short one.

Hired killer from the Lawrence Block’s book is named Keller (almost killer), he is about forty, he lives in an apartment in New York, alone (in some stories, he has a dog). Keller gets contracts a woman named Dottie, who serves as a secretary for the old man, who lives in the town of White Hills. Dottie calls Keller, he comes to the old man's house in White Hills, receives the job’s details from the old man acting as a broker, buys a plane ticket and flies to that city, where a future victim lives. While preparing for the job Keller can solve crossword puzzles, visit houses for sale, dreaming, as if he lived in a certain town, or takes part in auctions for philatelists, in general, he just kills time, as does any traveling man when the work itself takes relatively little time.

While each story of the collection is built around a murder, Block devotes relatively little space to very process of "taking away" the victim. Block more interested in how the assassin could spend his time when he is not doing the work. Keller walks his dog, Keller collects stamps, Keller makes acquaintance with a pet sitter, Keller saves grandson of one of the victim from the pool, Keller drink ice tea with Dottie on the veranda. The collection could well be renamed to "Everyday life of a hitman."

«Keller, riding substantially more than a thousand miles, albeit on a plane instead of a horse, was similarly charged with killing a man as yet unmet. And he was drifting into the Old West to do it, first to Denver, then to Casper, Wyoming, and finally to a town called Martingale. That had been reason enough to pick up the book, but was it reason enough to read it? »

Despite his relatively young age, Keller is behaving like a man much older than his years. Outside of work, Keller has a measured and leisurely life. Hit Man is a leisurely read too, where there is much to enjoy.

Quarry from the novel by Max Allan Collins doesn’t have a measured Keller’s life. At the very beginning of the novel the hitman kills a man dressed as a priest at the airport bathroom, after finding in his lining two bags of heroin. Quarry clearly understands his profession: he is an assassin, not muscle. He is supposed to kill their victims, not interrogate them using torture. Quarry hides heroin in the airport safe box, thus giving a lesson to the Broker, a man who gives orders to Quarry.

Quarry is a Vietnam veteran who'd become a drunk, if Broker had not picked him up and teached (so to speak) him how to be a hired killer. Quarry has been five years in the business, but he begins to tire of his work. Quarry is irritated by everything: his shiftless life, Broker that holds Quarry for a fool, and his partner in a new business in a small town. Quarry promises himself out of the game, but first he needs to finish the last job, and this is where things go awry.

«I was spoiled, maybe, from five years of smooth runs, five years of nothing-goes-wrong and then all of a sudden Boyd loses his edge and almost gets me killed last job. Then Broker pulls that half-ass, last-minute airport deal on me, where it's not enough I off the guy, I got to play strong-arm and delivery boy too. By that Broker betrayed the trust I had in him and our working arrangement. »

Quarry is an anti-hero created by Collins and you may find it difficult to empathize with him. But when the hitman is in trouble, the reader goes on his side. Collins’s prose is stinging, exposed wires. Dialogues sometimes seem fake, but Collins buys you over with the pressure and energy, apparently with an influence of Mickey Spillane.

Both books have become classics of the genre.

The Poacher's Son

Paul Doiron
The Poacher’s Son

Minotaur Books, 2010/Constable & Robinson, 2013

Narrator of The Poacher's Son Mike Bowditch is a game warden in the state of Maine and he is a rookie. His job is thankless, difficult and, most importantly, poorly paid. Mike sets cleared traps for the bear, writes tickets to tourists, coming out from Boston on a fishing trip, and all alone lives in a small cabin in the woods.

Mike almost at once forgets about bears and sharp-tongued fishermen, when near the tavern a deputy sheriff and a timber company executive are killed. At night, after the killings, Mike’s father Jack Bowditch, a drunkard, a brawler, a womanizer and a poacher, whom Mike had not seen for two years, calls and leaves a strange message on the answering machine. The next day, all state police are already looking for Jack Bowditch: after the arrest Jack beat a deputy sheriff up and ran. Detectives believe that Jack Bowditch killed a cop and a manager after the meeting at which the announcement was made that all the land in the county was bought by a large company, which means all the inhabitants of the land would be forced to leave the land.

Mike is the only one who believes in the innocence of his father. Going against the orders of his boss, Mike gets into the thick of the action, hoping to find the real killer and clear his father's name.

Being a first-rate whodunit, The Poacher's Son is also a powerful statement on the theme of fathers and sons. Choosing the profession of a game warden, Mike wants to be the opposite of his poacher father. Mike does not feel (or felt) no love for his father, but still believes in his innocence.

Doiron, by placing the action of the novel in the wild woods of Maine, filled his book with disparate wildlife, but making it obvious that the most dangerous animal in the forest is not a bear or a wolf but a man. Even the even-tempered Mike closer to the finale almost loses his balance and almost turned into a psychopath because of extreme nervous strain.

Flashbacks in the book are truly memorable, the details of warden’s life is phenomenal, and in addition to that, The Poacher's Son puts some traps for the reader when touches upon the topic of honor and conscience of the officer of the law. Is it possible to bend the law for yourself, when it comes to the life of the beloved one? What matters more, the freedom of the father or badge? If you can not clear the name of the father, can you let him get away?

With The Poacher's Son you can go on a bear: it one hundred percent will knock you down.

The Three-Day Affair

Michael Kardos
The Three-Day Affair

Mysterious Press, 2012

Four college friends agree to meet after a long break. Will, the narrator, has become a sound engineer and moved to the suburbs after the murder of the bassistof the band, where he played the drums, and he wants to share the idea of seting up an indie label with friends. Will is sure his well settled friends will help him with money. Nolan went into politics and runs a campaign to the state senate. Jeffrey earned millions during the dot-com boom. Evan is about to become a junior partner at a law firm. Jeffrey and Nolan arrive in Newark, and Evan is delayed, so the three friends are planning a weekend full of golf and the telling of tales. But on the first night of the meeting Geoffrey tries to rob a store and then pushes a young saleswoman from this store against her will into the car where his friends are waiting. Will doesn’t understand what’s happening but follows the instructions of his friend, and so the three law-abiding friends for the first time break the law on a grand scale - kidnapping. The girl is taken to the recording studio, where Will works. Jeffrey explaines to friends that he went bankrupt and lost all his millions, and, in desperation, he commited the crime. Friends realize that their hopes for a brighter future have come to an end.

The Three-Day Affair wins the reader's heart not from the start. The heroes of the novel are office workers, hipsters, kids of middle class parents, quite effeminate creatures. Problems in their lives are nothing comparing to the problems of hard workers, criminals and sociopaths, the traditional heroes of noir. White-collar workers are rather well-off: they do not know hunger, cold and constant humiliation. When dreams of the middle class break - not becoming a senator, not creating a label, not becoming a partner in the firm, - tired used car salesman and pickpocket dance on the ruins.

Crime of the three characters also looks like a whim of assured people. Some mind-boggling theft in the bakery, kidnapping a young dumb cashier, it’s immediately apparent that these thoughtless actions are easy to fix without any consequences. This is where the fun begins.

Friendship begins to crack, kidnapped girl confuses the facts and the situation is getting worse. Kardos with flashbacks makes the projection of the past: college friends, too, have the secrets from each other.

White collar or not, but the emotions come out, and that's when you start to empathize to unlucky kidnappers.

The Three-Day Affair is a debut novel, astute, well-crafted and gloomy. Oh yeah: finale here is mind-blowing.

Point and Shoot

Duane Swierczynski
Point and Shoot

Mulholland Books/Mulholland UK, 2013

I should immediately warn you: Point and Shoot should be read only after if you are familiar with the previous two books of the trilogy. This third book about Charlie Hardie does not really work as a stand alone novel, which, if read in isolation from the previous books of the series, will not have much sense.

For the same reason, write a review on Point and Shoot is pretty hard: a reviewer every time is risking to step on the minefield of spoilers. Those who have read the first and second books already know what happened to Charlie Hardie before he, at the beginning of the third book, found himself on the Earth's orbit. Those who have not read previous books, you’d better run and get Fun and Games and Hell and Gone as soon as possible.

The first novel of the series was not for me not just one of the best thrillers of 2011, but one of the best thrillers ever written. Duane Swierczynski’s imagination knocks you down, and the novel could justly be called the King of the Pageturners. Hell and Gone had a very different pace: the novel was important as part of the whole story, but on its own was a disappointing read. The author went too far with the melodrama, and the book smelled of cardboard and stupidity.

The third book was to be decisive: Will Swierczynski be on the level of the first book, or will fail, as in the case of the second? Point and Shoot is a worthy conclusion of the trilogy, but still not up to the level of Fun and Games. In the first two books Swierczynski used so many unexpected twists that it seemed there’d not left any for the third. Certainly not. In Point and Shoot imagination is bursting, so there will be enough surprises for a few more books. Having started the book on the orbit of the Earth, Unkillable Chuck as a meteorite will rush to Earth to save his family.

Disappointing point in the novel is only that a sense of fatalism disappeared, which was plenty in the first book. The plot wobbles, twists surprise, Charlie is striking in its indestructibility, but from the very first pages it becomes clear how the book will end.

And hard to read lines like these with a straight face:

«Hardie decided he wanted a beer. Like, yeah, right now. It was the morning in Philadelphia, but it was afternoon here in space. He should have insisted that they install a cooler in this damned thing, maybe arrange for monthly shipments of quarter-kegs or even a couple of six-packs. Beer is packed with nutrients, right? If you're going to stick a guy in a tin can, at least give him a couple of cans to open every now and again.
But no. The satellite was too small for such an extravagance as a beer. »

However, the trilogy is complete. BOOM! It’s your own fault, if you haven’t read it yet.

The Butcher's Boy

Thomas Perry
The Butcher’s Boy

Scribner, 1982

Unnamed assassin, whom we know only by a nickname from the title, appears in the book not at once. At the beginning of the novel someone blows up a union leader of one production company in his own truck, and this death comes to the attention of the Department of Justice analyst Elizabeth Waring. A young employee every day filters the flow of information, helping the department to highlight those daily deaths which could well have been assassinations. But even having isolated suspicious death, Waring and Organized Crime division often can not get out on the trail of a killer, or to prove with absolute certainty that this or that person has been killed by a hitman.

Started out at the site of the explosion of trade union leader, Elizabeth barely has time to look into the case file, as she is immediately recalled to Denver, where under mysterious circumstances an elderly senator has died.

A senator's murder is the work of the butcher's boy, which for the first time appeares on the pages of the book. After poisoning the old man the hitman returnes to Vegas, having done the job for a few days before the agreed deadline and waiting for his "fee", of such amount, that it should be enough for a comfortable existence for many years. But in Las Vegas the hitman feels that something is wrong and that theere won’t be any payment. Someone gave the task to remove him. One death follows by another and the butcher’s boy needs to find a way out - to make whoever seek him give up on him. But it will not be easy.

The Butcher's Boy only masquerades as an action-thriller about a hired killer; in fact it is a book about the professionalism and professionals. In the center of the novel is the struggle of two specialists, two masters of their craft. Hitman and analyst of the Department of Justice are complete opposites of each other, but it is if you look only at one side. They stand on opposite sides of the law, and their work methods are different, but both of them are Professionals with a capital letter.

The butcher’s boy and Waring are both single, have no family, no friends, both of them are doing their job diligently and carefully, checking all possibilities; both look like the cold-blooded species, but are also subject to emotions. The entire novel waring is on the trail of the unnamed assassin, but she doesn’t even know that she’s on a track. The hitman is always one or even two steps ahead of the law. He has an advantage that Waring hasn’t - no one knows about him and he does not leave any marks.

But why in this wild race if the hitman is making mistakes, then he fixes them without consequences for himself, but if professional Waring is wrong, there is nothing to fix? Probably in the novel lies an idea that the professional works without error, if he is alone, he has no resistance, he does not waste his energy in vain. Waring only nominally is a loner, yet she is part of the government machine. And in any machine there is leaking, broken parts, and part of the energy is consumed by friction. If Waring worked alone, she probably could catch the hitman, but she is only an analyst, the lowest link in the great chain.

As to literary value of the novel, I can say about it somethimg like that: you read the first half of the book with an open mouth. You read the first half of the novel, not understanding what is going on. Perry shows and does not tell: the accuracy of the details here is awesome, from the type of the ice, which is right to freeze the body, to the wiretaps in the hotel rooms. The hitman is just doing something essential to his survival, and we are watching him, trying to guess where this or that action will lead to. The nameless hero rarely remembers his childhood and his teacher, the butcher, who taught the boy everything he knew himself.

«There is a magic elixir to make you disappear," Eddie had said. “It's money. If you have enough of it you can go anywhere and do anything and nobody will ask you where you got it. But that's only if you've got enough of it so you don't ever have to do anything to get more.”»

The book is hardly life-affirming, but The Butcher's Boy convinces in one thing: there is always a way out, even when there is not.

Perhaps, the best novel about the hired killer ever.

Swamplandia!

Karen Russell
Swamplandia!

Vintage UK, 2012

Theme park Swamplandia! was at the peak of success, until Hilola Bigtree, the main attraction of the park, had died. The Bigtree family every evening made a show for tourists who on the ferry arrive to the marshy fringes of Florida to look at Hilola, female wrestler with alligators in the swamp pit. The father, nicknamed Chief Bigtree, with his wife was in charge of an amusement park, and their three children, the eldest 17-year-old Kiwi, 16-year-old Osceola and the youngest, the narrator of story,13-year-old Ava, helped their parents. Swamplania! offered cheap beer and many other attractions, but mostly families came from the mainland to look at Hilola, which, in her words, once won the tournament among female alligators wrestlers. But Hilola, not yet forty, got cancer, chemotherapy didn’t not help, and Hilola died during one of her shows, had not emerged from the swamp pit.

In the absence of the main star Swamplandia! can offer visitors nothing outstanding, and gradually the flow of spectators dried up until even cheap beer lovers stoped coming.

«Where had all the families gone? The families were gone. All at once, it felt like. Families had been our keystone species of tourists on Swamplandia! and now they were rarer than panthers. Red-eyed men with no kids in tow started showing up at the Saturday shows. Solitaries. Sometimes they debarked the ferry with perfumed breath, already drunk. Sometimes they motored over from the Flamingo Marina in Loomis County on their own junker boats, and always they seemed far more interested in the cheap beer and the woodsmoke black racks of the fried frog legs than our tramway tours or our alligator wrestling—somehow Swamplandia! seemed to have earned a truck-stop reputation as a good place to “get obliterated” on a weekend night. One guy I found urinating on the side of our gift shop—the actual wall, even though the public bathrooms with the vault toilets were just a five-minute walk down the trail! I hated them. When we had a crowd of these red-eyes, the Chief would not let me wrestle and performed the whole show himself. The Chief liked most every tourist with a wallet but he cooled on these guys. He blamed the World of Darkness for them, too.»

Naturally, the park is immersed in debt, though, in general, no one especially shakes Chief Bigtree down.

Young writer Karen Russell could take the action of her debut novel not in the jungle swamps of Florida, but in the jungles of some other world, and it would have been a fantasy at the intersection with realism. But Russell has remained true to realism, with a touch of fantasy. The reversal of the sum is not changing, and Swamplandia! turns out an exciting book, whatever genre it is.

In the first half of the novel Russell builds and develops the mythology of the world of Swamplandia!. Bit by bit the world is becoming wild and original. Everything plays on the entourage, from names and nicknames to describings of the correct feeding of alligators and proper clamping their mouths. World of Swamplandia! is in itself mysterious and alluring, and half of its charm is that the story (most of it) tells by the child, in fact - the child, which in exception of her family and the park has not seen next to nothing about life outside of the park and doesn’t understand the surrounding world, one that is outside of the park and wetlands. For the same reason, the comic effect is achieved when we read about the life of Kiwi Bigtree on the mainland. He is quick-witted young man, but sometimes he does not understand the elementary things. In the end, we see that civilization has an effect on everyone and in a short time: Kiwi closer to the finale already goes to bars and knows how to swear.

Having built up the mythology, Karen Russell can only regulate the world, and the story tells itself. Already mythology starts to pays off the writer. And if everything goes well with Kiwi, not so well for Ava. However, you look closely at the heroes, as the plot begins to accelerate to the finale. Perhaps the only fragment of the novel, which is not up to novel’s high standards, is a description of travel of Ava and Bird Man to a fictional hell (though it can be called the real one). Prose loses some elasticity, and it becomes tougher to burst through the text, as difficult as for Ava and her companion burst through the swamps and jungles.

From the book’s end you can make a useful thought: good is not where you was born, good is where you feel good. Russell’s Swamplandia! is a great, "swamp" reading, both literally and figuratively: sucks you in and you can’t help it.

Serious Men

Manu Joseph
Serious Men

John Murray, 2011

At the center of this funny story are two men working at the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai, India. But the place of work of perhaps is the only thing that unites them.

Ayyan Mani is a representative of the lowest caste. Janitor's son, Mani began working at the Institute as a courier, rising to the position of secretary to one of the most important researchers of the Institute Arvind Acharya. Mani, after ten years of marriage, became tired of his silly wife and half-starved existence. His wife no longer seems attractive; the future does not seem bright. Not being the holder of outstanding intelligence, Mani nevertheless has the ability to intrigue. Every day, Mani places on the stand at the Institute fictitious quotes, allegedly belonging to an outstanding scientist or thinker, but in fact he makes these statements up. The only way to rise from the bottom Mani sees in his clever son. But just cleverness alone is not enough, you need something more. Deaf in one ear, Adi is presented by his father as a mathematical genius.

Eccentric people inhabit this somewhat eccentric story. «Serious Men» can be easily mistaken for satire, but it is rather humorous novel. Satirical allusions to the structure of Indian society, Indian science and Indian religion then are withdrawn dashed, and the humor here, perhaps, is even English.

All the troubles come from women - about this with a smirk on his face Manu Joseph is trying to tell us. Indeed, the plot is moved with this premise. This is the same engine of the ridiculous here. The two main characters are tormented by vanishing love in them. They're both tired of their wives, available lovely creatures with whom they had once felt good, and now somehow uncomfortable. Both the secretary and the scientist, excel, as they can, just to pull themselves out of the swamp, to refresh their covered with cobwebs existence. Mani sets up to the scam involving his son to shake his wife, to prove to her that even the lower castes can achieve something. Acharya is looking for bodily pleasures, and finds them in a lovely young colleague. But the scientist forgets that science and feelings are different matter, and they require a different approach. At the beginning of the novel there are a few funny scenes where Acharya looks in the mirror at his body, starts to use deodorant, though he already seems to have given up on his looks long ago.

The story would be lost in the background of similar ones, if the action occurred in Britain, for example, not in India. Exotic colors entourage battered story in a new way. The people there have a different mentality, different views on life, different values. The mere fact that India has the Institute for the search of extraterrestrial life, is laughable.

Joseph is verbose, but he does have a sense of the word. He can equally good describe the poor neighborhood and the meeting of the Disciplinary Commission. This is a leisure reading, but because, after all, it is not a thriller.

Serious Men does not discover new lands, but tells a story that could suck you in and make you laugh.

Hogdoggin'

Anthony Neil Smith
Hogdoggin’

Bleak House Books, 2009
(e-book, 2011)

After Yellow Medicine Billy Lafitte remains at large, proved his innocence in the terrorist case. But an FBI agent Rome does not think so. Rome secretly from his colleagues continued to develop Billy’s case, hoping this time to catch Lafitte on the old crime. Billy himself now has been hanging out with a gang of bikers, acting as a muscle for the gang leader Steel God.

Rome hopes to reach out to Billy, using his flabby ex-wife. After learning about the actions of Rome, Lafitte immediately takes off, throwing the bikers, but not breaking ties with them completely. Billy is going home, and already on the way bad things start to happen.

If in the first Lafitte novel Yellow Medicine Billy was a kind of axis around which the events of the book revolved, there Billy is such an arrow that is tangentially touches everyone and everything, the thread on which planted other characters-beads. And it turned out not a fun trinket from the imitation jewelry department, but an explosive mace, uncontrollable and deadly. «Hogdoggin'» is written in the third person, and almost half of the book Lafitte spends unconscious. And if in the first book we learned Billy through the other characters, here we learn other characters through Billy.

Anthony Neil Smith already in his debut proved that he has the wildest imagination. In Hogdoggin' he proves it, imagine for example half a dozen officers of the law gone AWOL.

This novel, like rottweiler (see the title), is cutting into your throat and doesn’t let you go live. They say the third book about Lafitte is already written. Well, looking forward to.

Schroder

Amity Gaige
Schroder

Twelve, 2013

Before us is a letter of apology written by Eric Schroeder, to his ex-wife Laura at the time, while he awaits trial. Schroeder is accused of kidnapping his six-year old daughter, Meadow, which he calls Butterscotch. His lawyer asked him to write a long letter with all the details describing what Eric did with his daughter in the days after the kidnapping. Such letter, according to the lawyer, might help to mitigate the punishment, if Laura forgives her ex-husband.

Eric Schroeder is not a crafty criminal, but his whole life was built on lies. At an early age, Eric and his father immigrated from East to West Berlin. Eric had almost forgotten sis mother, and Eric is not sure, whether they left the mother, or she left them. At age 14, Eric moved with his father to Boston, where his father was offered an electrician’s job. Father and son wanted to be naturalized, but remained in the US illegally. Wanting to leave the past behind, at 14 in 1984, Eric invents himself a new identity. In an era when there were no databases and computers, it was easy to become a different person. Eric is applying to a summer camp as Eric Kennedy, a good student and an obedient son of the patriarchal family with money. So, three summers in a row, Eric goes to the camp as Kennedy, and the coincidence of his name with the name of the Kennedy brothers opened many doors to him, though he denied the family relationship with the president. When he’s 16, in the camp, Eric met with Laura, which promptly falls in love with. Eric and Laura quickly got married and honeymooned five days on the beaches of Virginia. After that Eric begins to sell houses, and he does it perfectly. Soon Meadow, a daughter, was born, and Eric is quite able to give his daughter everything a baby needs. But the marriage did not last.

Despite the fact that this book in the form of the message is addressed to Laura, Laura is almost outside of the narrative. Schroder is more than a personal letter, but an open letter, because Eric Schroeder’s thoughts and feelings asks out, it is essential to know everyone about them, not just one person.

The whole book is hardly a love letter: it certainly has the remains of feelings to the one who is the narrator once loved, but, as Eric says, times struggles with love, and time usually wins. But there is no open hatred to the one that robbed Eric of his child.

Schroder is a tragic story with a known right from the beginning ending, but that snatches you and pulles forward. Behind the thriller’s plot hides a non-thriller story, made entirely of different stuff than a thriller. This is such antitriller when there seems to be all related elements, but they do not fit in the usual way. The protagonist is not a bloodthirsty monster, stealing children and cut them into pieces, but a strange man, a psychologist and a good father, lost in himself and in the world. He can cause such empathy and sympathy for the course of reading, that you would never call him a criminal.

Meadow, the girl, is also not a faceless creature that has been stolen as useless broken iron, but a full-blooded little child, thinking and quite charming. Meadow is the companion of her father, not the victim of kidnapping. Angel, another heroine of the book with an unusual view of the world, is the signal from the past, the personification of American roadside motels.

Knowing that everything will end soon, the narrator tries to finally speak out, to find the causes of what happened in the past. The hero of the book examines pauses, and the book is made up of these pauses, innuendo. The narrator seems to be very sincere, but his behavior can be judged that his sincerity has gaps, gaps in his story. We listen to his stories, we want to ask more questions, but this is not a dialogue, this is a monologue, a letter to one side.

Letters of this kind and this force should have been put into the bottle, then to throw them into the sea - for our future generations. Then our followers will appreciate the power of the writer's gift of humanity.