“He and Manny had been robbing dealers for about a year. Had been in the life for a long time before that, of course. Stole cars, broke into houses. They had met in Juvie, a place called Lima, out in Delaware County. Taking off dealers wasn’t something you could do if you didn’t know who was who, what to look for. You had to score dope to know dope dealers, or know people who did. Where to go, what to watch for. Manny had been in rehab and knew people who were out copping every day.”

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale  (MAR 26, 2011)

Dennis Tafoya’s first novel, Dope Thief, published in 2009 is an excellent novel and more emotional  of a book than I thought it would or could be. Ray, a young man of 30 who has spent time in “Juvie” and prison for much of his life, has found a way to get some money with his friend Manny by stealing from independent drug dealers. These mostly small-time dealers are unlikely to seek help from the police or the mob in getting back their money or drugs. Ray and Manny even have the DEA jackets to scare the dealers into submitting to them. This seems like a good deal for Ray and Manny until they find much more money and drugs than they expected from some hick drug dealers working out of a farm in northern Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  Unfortunately, these drug dealers were associated with dealers in Connecticut that were moving into the area that are not too happy about the theft. These men use quick and violent methods to try to get their money and drugs back. This leads to some scary situations for Ray and Manny as they try to avoid these very dangerous and violent men and seek the help of Philadelphia area drug dealers who may not want the Connecticut competition.

This book is told in the third person perspective of Ray that makes it almost seem like a first person novel. Through this perspective, often through flashbacks, we learn of Ray’s guilt over the death of his high school girlfriend Marletta who died in a car accident while Ray is driving. Even though Ray was not at fault, he did not fight his conviction and imprisonment when the girl’s grief-stricken state trooper father framed him. Ray’s inner struggles are the best part of this book especially when he later meets Michelle in a Doylestown book store and struggles with finding the strength to become a better person and develop a meaningful relationship with her.

Ray also struggles in his relationship with his now dying father Bart but is fortunate and definitely appreciates the love and support he has received from Bart’s live in girlfriend Theresa. Theresa, who Ray sometimes calls “Ma” stays to raise Ray after his father is sent to the prison in Chester. Theresa’s positive influence on Ray becomes more evident as Ray struggles with his personal decisions about his future.

Dope Thief is one of the best first novels I have ever read and possibly the best, rivaling my favorites by Michael Connelly (The Black Echo), Steve Hamilton (A Cold Day in Paradise) and William Kent Krueger (Iron Lake). I was surprised to find that Dope Thief missed being nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, or Barry awards for best novel or best first novel in 2010. Dennis was nominated in 2010 by Spinetingler Magazine in the New Voice novel category but lost to The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville.

As I was reading Dope Thief, I was reminded of George Pelecanos’ The Way Home, another excellent book I had read several weeks prior. In both books, a young man struggles to find his way toward a better life, free of crime and drugs. However, Ray of Dope Thief grows up in a much more difficult home with a mother who gives up on him and a father who spends most of the time in jail, while Chris Flynn of The Way Home grows up in a fairly normal middle class home with parents that try to help him to succeed.

Since I’m from the Philadelphia area I was more impressed about the negative aspects of the area that fortunately I have not had to experience. I’ve driven by the prison in Chester where Ray’s father is incarcerated without giving it much thought other than being surprised at how nice it actually looks from the outside (except for the barbed wire…) However, I never had to visit anyone there or had to go visit my own or anyone’s child in a reform school that is just a few miles away. I’ve been very fortunate with my family but Dennis Tafoya in writing The Dope Thief made me realize it even more. Of course, the Delaware County portion of the Philadelphia area (where I have lived all of my life) has many great places and not just the prison, reform schools and drug dealers depicted in this book. Maybe I need to talk to Dennis about these nice parts the next time I see him. They are not so interesting though to a crime novelist I guess. Dennis does portray his own Bucks County much more favorably and I certainly enjoyed reading about the various parts of that area.

I became interested in Dennis Tafoya after seeing him at Noircon in Philadelphia in November, 2010 and then even more so after reading his story, “Above the Imperial” in Philadelphia Noir. I enjoyed the story and actually edited out a discussion of the story in the review to keep it from getting too long. I was certainly expecting to enjoy the book and expected to read about crime, death and the ugly parts of Philadelphia but did not expect the book to be as well written and deep as it is. I’m glad I still have The Wolves of Fairmont Park (2010) to read, and hopefully many more future books.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Minotaur Books; First Edition edition (April 28, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Chuck Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dennis Tafoya
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Philadelphia Noir The Way Home by George Pelecanos

Bibliography:

• Dope Thief (2009)
• The Wolves of Fairmont Park (2010)

Found in these collections:

• Philadelphia Noir (2010)
• G.I. Joe: Tales from the Cobra War (April 2011)

“ My name is Johnny Future and I care about what’s gonna happen and what’s happening and what has happened and everyone that it all has happened to and right now it’s late at night which is when I care the most and I’m sitting in my favorite chair at the window of my apartment drinking Nyquill, and I’m looking out onto the roofs of the world, and I’m thinking about all the people sleeping and dreaming.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (JAN 13, 2010)

Steve Abee has created, in Johnny Future, a character with a unique voice and energy. He represents a blend of a hyper-urbanized Holden Caulfield, sassy and street-smart, with a big-hearted and wide-eyed Huck Finn. It is no small matter that I compare Johnny Future, the character, with these two icons of American literature. I find him that compelling, his voice that unrelenting. It is a voice that becomes less concise and more shrill in the latter half of the novel, but that is to be expected, given the course of events. What else would you expect from a guy named Future, with a hooker girlfriend named America, a buddy named Jesus and sidekick called Beast? But I am getting ahead of myself.

We meet Johnny on this 30th birthday, kicking back a Nyquil cocktail. “I drink a shot of Nyquil and pour myself another and drink it and pour myself one more and sit back and wait.” He goes on:

“I don’t know what I’m waiting for. My mouth is dry so I put down my Nyquil and stumble into the kitchen to get a drink of water. The clock on the wall says 4:15 in the morning. I’ve been up for a couple of days, doing drugs, if you really want to know. I like doing drugs, any drug. I do them any chance I get, but I try not to buy them cause I don’t have a job. I’ve been doing speed which I got a hold of from a chick who was staying down the hall, but she’s gone now. She was having a little moving party. So she’s gone, and so is the speed.”

The tone and voice of Johnny is that of someone on the cusp of despair. He is thirty years old, has no job, is strung out on drugs, no family, except for his Grandma Dolly, who raised him and has now been removed to a nursing home. “…I should go and visit her but I don’t because it’s probably freaky there, with old people lying on the floor in the hallway, moaning in a puddle of pee and I don’t want to see that. I just don’t.” It is Dolly, and his memories of her, that bring him a humanity. Without Dolly he would be just more literary existential roadkill. His guilt, and his effort to address it, propels the narrative. It was Grandma Dolly who told the child Johnny that his mother had killed herself and took care of him from then on. Getting to her, to rescue her and somehow rebuild the only home he’s known, is what brings Johnny focus. It is, as he calls it, his “mission.” But in the best picaresque fashion, our young hero must have adventures, most of them unseemly, before he can execute his mission.

He gets a job at a porno store, owned by black and gay Maurice, called SEX LAND. Here he peruses porn magazines to pass the time, while trying to avoid the repugnant customers, particularly those emerging from the back room, where the booths are. Johnny voices his opinion, which is harshly skeptical, about the booths to Maurice. Like most of his thoughts, he says it out loud without realizing it. Maurice tells him, “Sex is love, my friend, Mr. Johnny whatever your name is.” The porno business is then summarized: “And only Love will set us free. Read your Bible, it’s in there. Jesus was a Love Man.”

It is this technique, the irreverent placed in the thick of the absurd, which makes the novel funny and at the same time poignant and relevant. It is a technique Abee uses repeatedly and the juxtaposition works well. For instance, in a passage reminiscent of Yeats’s famous line, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, (a line, which brings illumination to the entire novel), Johnny wonders “about Dolly and what happened to her and I wonder what it was like when she went down, got the stroke I mean. She was in the kitchen, I know that much. What was she thinking? You know, it’s all falling apart. What’s happening to me? How did she get to the hospital? Who called? Then I think about Jesus, not Jesus Chang [his friend], but the other one, and how he got nailed to the cross. What was he thinking? It’s all falling apart? What’s happening to me?”

Introspective and flatly observant, Johnny does what he can to address the only aspect of his life about which he feels he can influence. While partying with his friends, Willy the Bag, Junior, Baby Juice and Jesus, his mission settles on him, prompting him to action. With everyone passed out or too stoned to move, he decides to steal his buddy Junior’s purple Thunderbird, “Trouble Love.”

“Just then Willy the Bag and Junior come running around the corner of the house naked, headed right for me….The neighbors start cheering. Can’t tell who they’re cheering for. They should be cheering for me because I am incredible…I run for the car. America’s in the drivers seat. The engine’s running. Junior and Willy’re right on top of me, practically on my ass, right there, right behind me, gonna grab me. I turn around, gonna sock both of ‘em in the head. They’re right there, they’re running at me and I’m about to sock ‘em when Baby Juice swings her good leg and cuts both of them down at the knees and they just stop, cold, hit the ground, boom, thud moaning, dirt flying. The neighbors cheer louder…I open the door, get in the car. ‘Let’s go save your grandma, Johnny.’ We drive off. Junior’s naked and screaming on the lawn.”

I quote at length to demonstrate the frenetic nature of the narrative. Like Trouble Love, the Thunderbird, the story is outsized, over-powered and comes at you fast. Johnny escapes the party with America. They make their way to Dolly and kidnap her from the nursing home. While making the get-away, Johnny passes the headquarters building for Western Exterminator, with whom he had had an altercation early in the novel. “…the picture of the Exterminator, himself, yelling at the rat: you’re a bad apple. I’m gonna take your happiness and smash it. I’m gonna win.” It’s as if it’s directed to Johnny directly, But he will have none of it. “I ain’t listening to him,” he says. “I’m on a mission, a mission for all the rats, all the bugs, holding fork and knife, living with hunger, oblivious to doom, not playing his game, I’m making a new one, my own game, where I win and everyone I know wins and I am the King of Life, the King of Time.”

There is a bounty of symbolism in this novel, most of it in-your-face and overt, which makes me wonder if it’s symbolism at all. But that is just a technicality. He wants the American dream, to win, to be, as he says, the “King of Life.” His escape down the highway with his Grandmother and girlfriend, America, comes late in the book. Though driven by his mission, by which he presumes all will turn good in his life, Johnny realizes in short order that it cannot be. His grandmother is ailing. She is incontinent and occasionally incoherent. At one point he worries that she has expired. The police are giving chase–he did kidnap her, after all. With helicopters overhead and sirens behind him, he makes his way to the King’s house, another character with hyperbolic attributes. And here, as the King reveals a family secret, Johnny closes in–as close as he will get–on resolution. It is not apparent that he “wins” or becomes the King of anything, Life or Time, but he settles, as if life is nothing more than that–not winning or losing, but just to accomplish something, or in Johnny’s case, anything. By this measure, he meets with a degree of success in his mission. His Grandmother recognizes him and appreciates his effort. He delivers her “home” and the King congratulates him, that he done good. By one measure, he did do good. He reconnected with the little family he had known, took control, albeit briefly, of his life and became momentarily a person who makes something happen, rather than be a cog, a subject of action. He held on while the centre gave way.

Editor’s note:  Doug reviewed this from a MacAdam/Cage advanced review copy (ARC).  We were expecting MacAdam/Cage to release this last fall, however, it still has not happened.  I decided that this book is worth letting others know about… and of course, Doug’s review is worth reading.  Since the book is available in Kindle format, that is what I linked to.  You can read a Kindle book on your iPhone, iPod Touch or your PC, even if you do not own a Kindle.

AMAZON READER RATING:	no reviews on Amazon
PUBLISHER:	MP Publishing Limited (October 1, 2009) (Kindle)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AMAZON PAGE:	Johnny Future
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Poetic Diversity on Steve Abee
EXTRAS:	Salon.com review of Die for Love
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	This book makes me think of: Lowboy by John Wray The Financial Lives of Poets by Jess Walter Humpty Dumpty was Pushed by Marc Blatte The Song Is You by Arthur Phillips

Bibliography:

• Johnny Future (October 2009)

“How doped up are you?”

“Who?”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Mary Whipple (MAY 10, 2009)

Nobody Move, Denis Johnson’s first novel since his National Book Award-winning Tree of Smoke in 2007, is a complete change of pace from that novel, which focuses on the Vietnam War.  Here, Johnson sets his novel in Northern California in contemporary times, creating a noir study of drug-addled, alcoholic criminals who don’t have a clue about reality as they seek riches and revenge.

Full of maiming, torture, and gunshot wounds, all of which are gushers, and several of which are fatal, Nobody Move gives new life to “pulp fiction,” a kind of dressed up, somewhat literary, pulp fiction–at least stylistically.  For however superficial the story may be, however dark and violent the action may be, and however stupid and sociopathic the characters may be, Johnson is a writer with immense gifts of description, dialogue, and narrative compression, and he manages to create a vivid story with no wasted words.

Jimmy Luntz, a member of a barbership singing group, is heavily in debt to loan sharks when he is picked up by Gambol, an enforcer.  While Gambol is driving Jimmy through the countryside on his way to meet his fate, Jimmy takes advantage of a momentary lapse by Gambol, shooting him in the leg, pushing him out, and stealing Gambol’s wallet, his gun, and ultimately, his car.  While getting rid of the gun he used on Gambol, Jimmy meets Anita, a woman whose crooked husband, a Palo County prosecutor, framed her for a $2.3 million embezzlement for which a judge has ruled that she must pay $800 a month in restitution for the rest of her life.   Jimmy and Anita team up to try to get the money back, wanting to wreak vengeance, not seek justice.  In the meantime, Gambol is rescued from the culvert, from which he managed to make a cell phone call, by Mary, a former army nurse sent to bring him back to health by the syndicate.

As Jimmy and Anita try to avoid their pursuers, the violence ratchets up.  Everyone wants revenge on everyone else.  The syndicate still wants their money back, Gambol wants (literally) to dine on Jimmy’s private parts, and Anita wants her husband’s head.  The world of these twisted characters is, as Hobbes has observed, “nasty, brutish, and short.”  All of them are sociopaths, none of them think twice before shooting, and none of them have any regrets after they shoot.

The novel, published as a four-part serial in Playboy Magazine during the summer and fall of 2008, is also full of graphic, often violent sex.  “Seizing the moment,” the driving force for these characters, gains new meaning here in the dark and dreary world they inhabit.

Johnson, who is also a poet and playwright, makes this dark world vibrate with life, creating memorable descriptions which add to the mood:  “The crescent moon lay directly overhead, and on such a night the river’s swollen surface resembled the unquiet belly of a living thing you could step onto and walk across.”  On a rainy night one sees “ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.”  And on a good day,  “The morning seemed lit by a blowtorch.”  Even short character sketches are spot on:  Jimmy himself was “your basic bus-station javelina, but a nice enough guy.”

The dialogue sparkles, revealing character, mood, and relationships in only a few words:

He:  “[The man] is dead.  Gambol blew his head off.”

She:  “In a hundred years we’re all dead.”

He:  “Did you ever know anybody who got murdered?”

Beside him she was white and pale.  She:  “The dead come back.  Death isn’t the end.”

He:  “Let’s be optimistic..and assume that’s bullshit.”

Fun to read, this slight novel makes no pretense of being anything but a noir story about marginal characters leading dark and thoughtless lives, characters in the grip of their emotions at the expense of their reality.  They are all living for themselves and trying to stay alive, and they have no sense that life offers anything more than that.  A student of Raymond Chandler when he was a Master’s student at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Denis Johnson has learned his lessons well.  The book is what it is, he seems to say.  Take it or leave it.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 61 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 28, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Mary Whipple
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Denis Johnson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	We our review of: Train Dreams Tree of Smoke

Bibliography:

• Angels (1983)
• Fiskadoro (1985)
• The Stars at Noon (1986)
• Rescitation of a Hanged Man (1991)
• Jesus’s Son: Stories (1992)
• Already Dead: A California Gothic (1997)
• The Name of the World (2000)
• Tree of Smoke (2007) /
• Nobody Move (2009)
• Train Dreams (August 2011)

Other:

• The Icongnito Lounge: Poems (1992)
• The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems (1995)
• Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond (nonfiction) (2001)
• Shoppers: Two Plays (2002)

Movies from Books:

• Jesus’ Son (2003)