“Do the things you’ve done in your past add up to the person you are now? Or are you reinvented by the choices you make for the future? I used to think I knew the answer to those questions. Now I’m not so sure.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (OCT 9, 2011)

Hard Case Crime is back after a short hiatus, and for avid fans, the line-up is impressive: Quarry’s Ex by Max Allan Collins (delayed release from a year ago), Getting Off by Lawrence Block, The Consummata by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins, and Choke Hold by Christa Faust.

Choke Hold is novelist and former peep show girl Faust’s second title for Hard Case Crime, and it’s a sequel to Money Shot. Faust is Hard Case Crime’s first female novelist, and if you think that means a tender, sensitive look at crime, then think again. Faust’s protagonist is tough former porn star, Angel Dare, a woman who feels more comfortable giving a blowjob than extending a sympathy hug. In Money Shot, Angel, owner of an adult modeling agency came out of retirement for one last gig. Big mistake. The job is a set-up by some particularly nasty gangsters who are hunting for a briefcase full of cash. Angel, who’s raped, beaten and stuffed in the trunk of a car, finds herself on the wrong side of a prostitution ring.

Choke Hold (and the title’s meaning becomes clear as the story plays out) finds Angel living under an assumed name as a waitress in Arizona. She was part of the Witness Protection program for 19 months and attending mandatory therapy with a shrink named Lindsay:

“She was always making these unequivocal statements about ‘women in my situation’ that had nothing to do with how I actually felt. She also insisted that I was in denial about my ‘abuse’ in the adult film industry. I could never talk to her about the things that were really on my mind. About the fact I didn’t feel like a poor violated victim at all. I felt like some kind of war veteran. Like I’d been forced to turn off something important inside me to become the killer I needed to be and I didn’t have any idea how to turn it back on again. To become an ordinary citizen again, if such a thing were possible. So instead I spent most of our time during the sessions with her by telling the raunchiest, kinkiest stories about my ‘abuse.’ I think she secretly got off on it. Poor Lindsay just needed a decent orgasm.”

Angel’s boring life under the Witness Protection program comes to an abrupt end when she realizes that her cover’s been blown. With her emergency ever-packed, go-bag, “two shitty fake IDs” and a few grand in cash, Angel ran. She’s in Arizona, waitressing, and providing after-hours entertainment for her boss trying to work off the expenses of a forged passport when her past catches up to her in an explosively violent way. Thick Vic, crankster and washed-up porn star, unexpectedly walks into Angel’s diner and death’s along for the ride. From this moment until the novel’s conclusion, it’s non-stop action with Angel on the run from pissed off Mexican gangsters involved in illegal boxing matches and cocaine smuggling. And she’s also on the run from her old nemesis, brutal Croatian gangster, Vukasin.

Choke Hold moves the action from Arizona to the illegal boxing matches held in Mexico, to a Las Vegas porn convention with live-streaming action. Throughout the chase, Angel picks up two protectors, Thick Vic’s cocky son, Cody and Hank “The Hammer”–a legendary boxer who’s sunk to teaching in a tacky local gym, fighting illegal matches, and practicing a little loan enforcement on the side. It’s through Angel’s relationship with Hank that this pulp novel shows its depth beyond the action. Angel never sees herself as a victim, but here’s she’s used and abused more than once in an industry in which no one rides for free. Hank’s industry takes a similar approach. He’s boxed his way into physical damage and suffers permanent migraines and short term memory loss. There’s a sad connection between Angel and Hank–a connection of two people who use their bodies to get by.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Hard Case Crime (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Christa Faust
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Money Shot And: Quarry’s Ex by Max Allan Collins The Consummata by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

Bibliography:

• Control Freak (1998; 2002)
• Hoodtown (2004)

• Money Shot (2008)
• Choke Hold (2011)

With Poppy Z. Brite:

• Triads (2004)

“My name is Katherine, same as my mother’s name, same as my mother’s mother’s name. I’ve never been a Kathy, never been a Kath, not a Katie or a Kate, not a Kat, a Kitty, a Kitten, not a Kit. Katherine I have always been, as Katherine I am today.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (DEC 09, 2010)

Dozens of books have promised the sentiment “for lovers of Cormac McCarthy” and left me sorely disappointed. But, in this claim, Froderberg is truly McCarthy’s literary offspring, echoing his hot, haunting brand of southwest essence, desert landscape, and gothic narrative elixir, if not yet fully capturing his linguistic sublimity and lethal, graveyard humor. In this ambitious debut novel, the author explores desperate and broken souls living through a drought in southern Arizona—a land of sand and scrub, cactus stands, spiny shrubs, bitterbrush, dusty maiden, diamondbacks, rodeos, distant foothills, punishing climate, and an endless starlit sky. If you don’t like McCarthy’s prose style, you surely won’t relish Froderberg’s highly stylized prose and narrative, either. If, like me, you adore McCarthy’s (particularly his southwest) lore, such as The Border Trilogy, then you can potentially connect with and savor this quasi-mythical tale.

Seventeen-year-old bride Katherine lives with her (significantly older) husband, Son, and his kind-hearted and affluent parents, Rose and “Rose’s Daddy,” on their ranch on Old Border Road, in a stately adobe house above an aquifer. Rose’s Daddy calls Katherine “Girl” (affectionately), and Son calls her Darlin.’ She accepts her new identity and learns how to live and work on the ranch, including horse riding, barrel racing, and driving the water truck. Besides prospering from the ranch, Rose’s Daddy channels water to the coast, just like his father did, earning a heavy bounty and a lot of frowns from the local people. He tells Girl the history of the nomads who wandered to this land, leading up to his own father’s industrious wealth.

“They sought a fabled people within a fabled landscape. They sought a promised life…They walked across sandbanks of hot ash, the ground on which they walked trembling like paper sheeting, as if it were a fiery lake bubbling and steaming right beneath them.”

The narrative, told in Katherine’s voice, reads a lot like gothic fable. Although set in contemporary times, there is a timeless quality about it, and the author’s temporal sense is frequently ephemeral. Like McCarthy, she plays with tenses, and sustains a biblical subtext and timbre.

“The words as they were chalked, the sand and the dust, the grime and the duff and the tar and the oil and the mud, and whatever else of the earth we collect along the way, will all be washed away in the moon after, once we are back to here where we are, to begin another beginning.”

Katherine tells the story of the drought, of Son’s cruel infidelities, stemming from Rose’s Daddy’s infidelities, of Rose’s fragility, and the ghosts of stories that still haunt the adobe house. The desire of Katherine to stand by Son is increasingly frustrating as the story progresses, but taken as poetic fable, I was able to tolerate it. The characters are often not what they seem, and some shocking revelations are even more unnerving to the reader as the protagonist continues to honor her spousal obligations. Most characters do not develop over time; rather, who they are amplifies, the aperture widens, and the person you see is more resonant and less inscrutable, but unchanged. Unlike McCarthy, the author portrays a woman with some finesse.

There is a New Age priest, known as Padre, who beguiles his congregation with a noble mien and zen-like homilies, and whose relationship with Katherine leads her to a further maturity of mind, while she retains her fastness of character, deepening it. A rancher and businesswoman named Pearl Hart, her husband, Ham, and her daughter, also named Pearl, round out the story and enlarge the myth and mystery of the town.

You don’t read this novel for the individual characters but for their fate, and for Katherine’s. You read it for the themes of disillusionment and strength; the narrative grip of lush, elliptical language; the earthly elements that imperil and fortify these marginal people; and for the landscape that resounds like a character. You tacitly observe what is in a name, and what is not.

At times, the author’s talent overreaches, and the overwrought language and florid descriptions threaten to choke the narrative flow. I occasionally experienced reader fatigue. Froderberg hasn’t yet harnessed the nuanced linguistics and tension of McCarthy and his ability to create a chemical reaction in the reader, although she clearly is aspiring to. The tale acquired some dark humor toward the end, which the story was begging for at intervals. The problem with her style so closely resembling the master is that she hasn’t fully developed her own unique one. When she fails to attain McCarthy’s bracing, muscular tongue and allegorical depth, the reader notices her self-conscious drive to try.

As a novelist, this is Susan Froderberg’s first rodeo, and I am inclined to give the rope some slack. She is a debut author that will surely evolve over time. This is an earnest, inspired start, and facets of the story were well realized. I was exceptionally moved when I came to the last line of the story, a sentence that touched me with its purity, subtlety, and pith. Those final words fall strikingly smooth on the page, seizing the moment with indelible ink, without a hitch, without a sound.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company (December 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	BookPage interview with Susan Froderberg
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Southwesterns: No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy Crossers by Philip Caputo

Bibliography:

• Old Border Road (December 2010)

“Ben is wearing the knife when he rides out of Lochiel, crossing into Mexico as easily as one might cross a street in Tucson or Phoenix. There is no barbed wire to impede him, no signpost except for a tall stone boundary marker to tell him that he is leaving the Arizona Territory. He’s made this trip before but feels a small buzz nonetheless—it’s an adventure for a thirteen-year-old to ride alone into another country on a fine horse like Maggie, small, lithe, and fast, a possession he prizes more than the knife hanging from his belt in a plain leather sheath.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (OCT 21, 2010)

I dashed out to buy Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, Philip Caputo’s, latest novel after reading an enthusiastic review in my local newspaper. I was unfamiliar with this author, but I was intrigued by the promise of a burly border tale. I was not disappointed. This is a generational saga and epic of the southwest, bristling with illegal border crossers and warring drug cartels, studded with outlaws and vaqueros. A dense book, it starts rather slowly, gradually lassoing the reader into a complex, emotional story brittle with sepulchral secrets and spilling with scoured grief.

Gil Castle, a Wall Street broker broken by the death of his wife in the tragic events of 9/11, lives day to day in suicidal agony. At the advice of his grown daughters, he has submitted to therapy. However, the platitudes of “healing” and “closure” bring him even further to the brink of despair. He prefers to read the intellectual, reflective stoics, such as Seneca, or the Greek tragedian, Aeschylus; they speak to him with a deep and thoughtful gravitas. He rebuffs what he considers the psychobabble of grief counseling, of America’s proposition that we weren’t meant to suffer for long periods of time, “as if grief were something like digestion.” As a last grasp for hope, he decides to leave New York and move to a small cabin in Patagonia, a berg in the desert of the Arizona-Mexico border, where his cousin still owns and operates a cattle ranch that has been in the family for a century. His maternal grandfather, Ben Erskine, pioneered this business, the San Ignacio Cattle Company. What Gil and the reader gradually discover is that this sprawling ranch is riddled with “ghosts and bones.”

Two main narrative threads emerge, each with its distinct flavor, tone, and color. The author creates a scintillating outlaw tale of the early twentieth century that is both chilly and taut, ripe and ropy. The actions of Gil’s desperado descendants alternate with the modern-day fable of family and the open graves of grief. The story seamlessly goes back and forth from Gil’s twenty-first century tale to Ben Erskine’s of a hundred years ago. Peppered throughout are letters and interviews with Gil’s relatives from mid-century. Caputo heightens the broad western tale with an astute character study, giving us some salty figures a la Cormac McCarthy meets Larry McMurtry, but branding his own mark and riding in his own saddle.

Crossers keeps its narrative focus, even as the subplots spread and the landscape widens. The vengeance and violence of the drug runners and border crossers keep the pace tight and the action grisly, as well as reticulate the ancestral histories and hatreds between and within families and neighbors. Moreover, the subplots serve as allegory and as metaphor to the wide divides of the human heart, and to the sorrows and histories that threaten to bury us in modern and distant tragedies.

Some of the characters are a little contrived or thin, although there are some, like Ben and Blaine, who are vibrant, blunt, and truculent, knotted like a fist. Gil’s unbridled Midas touch is a bit too convenient at times, but it is a minor affliction. Additionally, the author laid on the idea of evil terrorists a bit thick in the beginning of the novel–but, thankfully, to a larger purpose, which became evident as the story leavened. I am reluctant to discuss my controversial perceptions of 9/11 in any detail, except that I initially considered abandoning the story. Yet my instincts told me to persevere, that this wasn’t a polemical novel. Fortunately, the author’s dynamism eclipsed the indictments and he keenly underscored the dreadful, wretched terrorists that roam our souls–the penetrating terrorists that inhabit the psyche and scream from our hearts–the terrorism of the unconsoled.

I have read complaints (of earlier works) by a few readers that Caputo’s storytelling is too expository and more suited to journalism. Occasionally, Crossers is indulgent and immoderate, and I can see vestiges of the tendency. But he reined himself in and penned a captivating, sweeping story. Even with the minor flaws, this is a powerful, piquant tapestry of a tale.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (October 19, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Philip Caputo
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Acts of Faith

Bibliography:

• Horn of Africa (1980)
• Delcorso’s Gallery (1983)
• Indian Country (1987)
• Equation for Evil (1996)
• Exiles (1998)
• The Voyage (1999)
• Acts of Faith (May 2005)
• Crossers (October 2009)

Nonfiction:

• A Rumor of War (1977)
• Means of Escape: A Ware Correspondent’s Memoir o fLife and Death in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Vietnam (1991)
• In the Shadows of the Morning: Essays on Wild Lands, Wild Waters, and a Few Untamed People (2002)
• 13 Seconds: A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings (2005)
• 10,000 Days of Thunder: A History of The Vietnam War (September 2005)

Related:

• Interview with Philip Caputo (1989)

” A thousand cartoons and TV shows and teen movies would lead you to believe that when you’re drawing something at your desk in school, a pretty girl is going to say ‘What are you drawing?’ and you’ll tell her and she’ll go ‘That’s neat’ and your artistry will reveal to her the secret sensitivity in your soul and she’ll leave her football-player boyfriend for you. These cartoons and TV shows and teen movies are wrong.”

Book Review:

Review by Mike Frechette (FEB 6, 2010)

Darren Bennett likes to draw. This hobby makes him insecure 1) because he’s a sophomore in high school and he’s insecure about everything, and 2) because he knows that whatever he draws will result in a false label: “If you’re drawing the female figure, you’re a pervert. If you’re drawing the male figure, you’re gay. If you’re drawing superheroes and haven’t gotten around to drawing the masks or capes or whatever yet, you’re gay.” Nevertheless, it provides a fantastical escape from his increasing isolationism in an unremarkable Arizona suburb where he lives with his good-natured but neglectful father and complete hooligan of a brother, an arrangement that resulted when his “mom kind of went haywire.” When fellow outcast Eric Lederer compliments one of Darren’s drawings after class, a friendship forms that leads to “the biggest mistake of [his] life” and perhaps the worst false label of all. From a perfectly executed prologue to a thrilling sci-fi finish, DC Pierson’s debut novel will undoubtedly captivate readers and remind them of the limitless potential of the coming-of-age novel.

The book is called The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To, a mouthful of a title to be sure. However, the plot and prose move quickly, sustained by an original voice that embodies the essence of the contemporary adolescent experience – the parlance, the peer pressure, the drugs, the angst, the awkwardness around girls. At the same time, Darren and especially Eric possess a precocious, sarcastic wit that will engage a broad adult reading audience as well. Their nerdy, adolescent ineptness together with their mature humor makes for a great combination and stands out as the novel’s most endearing quality. In a pitiful attempt to prank Darren’s brother and his friends, Darren and Eric collect cheese slices, eggs, and rope, a hodgepodge of items that “makes it pretty clear [they’ve] never gotten revenge on anybody.” When Eric sees this, he realizes, “It looks like we’re going to make an omelet…rappel in through somebody’s window, and serve it to them.”

Such mature wit – on Eric’s part at least – is due largely to the fact that he literally cannot sleep and never has – hence the title. Instead of sleeping, he spends his nights pursuing his interests, getting homework done in advance, learning, aging beyond his years. As Darren tells him, “You’ve been awake while the rest of us have been asleep. You’ve actually had more life…so you’re twice as old, in terms of experience. You’re like thirty.” Such smarts make him a great creative partner for Darren as he attempts to develop a multimedia extravaganza for the sci-fi epic he’s been slowly piecing together in his imagination. For a jaded teenager like Darren, Eric is not just a friend but “a signifier that anything can be real” – that superpowers are possible. On the flipside, he bears the burden of ongoing consciousness. As Darren later realizes, “the poor kid has to live through everything.”

Besides that, the subconscious energy expended by all other people during dreams is expressed by Eric in painful, waking hallucinatory episodes. When he starts helping Darren with his sci-fi epic, the characters and storylines become more than just words and images on a page during these hallucinations. Meanwhile, a strange man claiming to be from a local church begins pursuing Eric when he discovers through Darren’s brother that Eric does not sleep. What Darren and Eric begin to question is just how powerful the imagination is and the very nature of reality itself.

Sustaining a literary career is difficult work, but DC Pierson is off to a good start. With youth and creativity stacked in his favor (he just graduated from college in 2007), he holds promise as a literary voice resembling Christopher Moore or Chuck Palahniuk. The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep is not just another book for the likes of Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts (though it is that), but it’s also a profound, funny story about friendship, betrayal, and regret. The only regret in reading it is that the end comes too quickly, and we cannot continue with Darren to the next phase of his life. Maybe, like Darren and Eric’s project, it’s only a small piece of “a TV series culminating in a movie trilogy interspersed with books and graphic novels with any remaining holes in the epic filled in by a massively multiplayer online game.” Or maybe not. Either way, it’s still a really good book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 47 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; 1 edition (January 26, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Mike Frechette
AMAZON PAGE:	The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	DC Pierson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and Author Interview
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More unique coming-of-age novels: Wolf Boy by Evan Kuhlman The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Bibliography:

• The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To (January 2010)

“…those who bear secrets are often the last to know the secret’s true nature.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (JAN 28, 2010)

The Butterflies of Grand Canyon names many of the beautiful invertebrates: Rheingolds, cloudless sulfurs, painted ladies, pygmy blues, green darners, and queens. Near the great natural gash in the earth’s crust, some of the human collectors of these delicate creatures find themselves passing through stages of development similar to those of the specimens they’ve netted. For example, twenty-five-year-old Jane Merkle, who has come with her older husband, Morris, to visit his sister, Dotty, and her husband, Oliver Hedquist, is arguably pent up in a chrysalis but may be on the verge of emerging and flying.

Then there is Elzada Clover, a botanist whose penchant for studying the flora of the Grand Canyon floor is being overtaken this summer of 1951 by a need to solve a thirteen-year-old unsolved murder of a local; she feels as if, for all her professional accomplishments, she has never been able to fully develop her personal inclinations. In other words, she hasn’t made it to the final stage of butterfly transformation. And inasmuch as butterflies are considered legally blind because their resolution is a hundred times worse than humans’, this novel often refers to figurative human blindness — to each other, to nature, to love, to ourselves. Just another way that the “butterflies” in this book aren’t just of the insect Lepidoptera order.

In this small Arizona community where rangers and naturalists seemingly outnumber storekeepers and postal clerks, the sometimes awkward mysteries of the human heart surface in all sorts of ways. One of the most amusing takes place during Jane’s foray to buy groceries. She and young ranger (and inexperienced romancer) Euell Wigglesworth strike up a conversation about whether she ought to buy three or four inches of liverwurst sausage. They can’t help feeling the effects of natural attraction as they grope for what to say. While in town Jane also gives in to the temptation to open someone else’s mail, and then concocts an ingenious, though underhanded, way to save herself the embarrassment of having to confess. Overcome with curiosity about the assignation being arranged in the letter, she finagles a way she can eavesdrop on the rendezvous. These two examples suggest Jane is scruples-challenged, but don’t judge her too harshly. The plot moves forward quite regularly due to overheard conversations; Jane isn’t the only culprit. And the degree to which marriage can or should forestall other attachments is a significant theme of this book, involving many characters.

The author, Margaret Erhart “is a river and hiking guide in the Grand Canyon and southern Utah” according to biographical sketch provided in The Butterflies of Grand Canyon, and one feels confident of the natural backdrop to this story. However, the characters and their odd, usually restrained conversations don’t always seem as convincing as the scenery. Yet, their cautious repression and bumbling “blindness” as they go through the habits of their days and their personal dramas also hook the reader (at least this one). And slowly, as revelations surface and both the characters and the reader have to adjust to new realities, the truth that the same things must be learned afresh by each generation is conveyed with a gentle nudge of small town shrewdness. Again, it isn’t just butterflies that mature through stages. People tend to also, Erhart’s novel wryly counsels.

This is a tale of conceits, comical set-ups and antics, secrets, infidelities, loyalties, schemes, awakenings, worldly wisdom, and the natural march of desire. The Butterflies of Grand Canyon approaches these signposts of humanity and life somewhat obliquely as times, but charmingly and memorably nonetheless.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 20 readers
PUBLISHER:	Plume; 1 edition (December 29, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AMAZON PAGE:	The Butterflies of Grand Canyon
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Margaret Erhart
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another novel set in the Grand Canyon: Girl with a Skirt of Stars by Jennifer Kitchell

Bibliography:

• Unusual Company (1987)
• Augusta Cotton (1992)
• Old Love (1996)
• Crossing Bully Creek (2005)
• The Butterflies of Grand Canyon (December 2009)