On the Nickel

John Shannon
On the Nickel

Severn House, 2010

Private detective Jack Liffey (the hero of a series of novels) after the prior case is confined to a wheelchair, having lost the gift of speech. Liffey’s friend calls for help, asking to find the fugitive 16-year-old son Conor Lewis. Daughter of the PI Maeve, unbeknownst to his father, takes up the case, playing a young sleuth. The investigation leads her to the Los Angeles area, the Nickel. Soon Maeve herself disappears, walking into the trouble. Liffey himself and his wife, Gloria Ramirez, a policeman, go to save Maeve and runaway youngster Conor.

The novel’s interest lays in that we see the mechanism of slums of Los Angeles. Developers (aka half-gangsters) want to take more and more land. Homeless people live in half-ruins. There even shoes will be stolen from invalid. Small gangsters show persistence and perseverance in the small business. And in this festering sore on the body of Los Angeles a young man who dreams of becoming a musician and a girl who dreams of becoming a detective get there, and he and she both are from good families. Shannon illustrates Nickel’s life not only by the plot twists and individual characters, who live here, but also the statistics at the end of each chapter.

«On the Nickel» is a book for young adults, pretending to be a book for adults. The main characters are maturing children, not Liffey and his wife. Maeve and Conor must fend their lives for themselves, and Liffey comes to the rescue closer to the final, becoming deux ex machina.

Teens will read a book with a great pleasure, adults will be confused by this book.

Vicki Hendricks kindle stories

Vicki Hendricks
Dangerous Sex: Two Stories
Tender Fruit

Self-published e-book, 2011

No one writes neonoir like Vicki Hendricks. Her collection «Florida Gothic Stories» was almost perfect, with one drawback: it has included not all the stories written by the author. A few stories from the anthologies remained uncollected. These stories have since not been republished, but now you can buy them in versions for the Kindle. Three stories, which became the subject of this brief review, are unlikely to be attributed to neonoir, they fit the definition by Hendricks herself – violent erotica.

If the author's noir stories also had enough sex and violence, but the focus was on violence, in the erotic stories the emphasis shifts toward sex. In the strongest story of the three «Tender Fruit» Ronnie is a typical loser, and troubles chase him at every step. If Ronnie’s friend, Don, is ok with the girls, then Ronnie is always a fool. Perpetual loser also wants not just sex, but also a great love. Ronnie does not know how his quest for a unique and desirable one will end. The story is not so much erotic, but there are a tense atmosphere, the inimitable voice of the author, the doomed hero of noir.

The other two stories, «Be Very Afraid» and «Penile Infraction», are less successful, primarily because of the not so strong plot. «Be Very Afraid» is stylistically very rich, but can not stand the seriousness of intent. The story can be read only as a parody of a pornomovie. «Penile Infraction» is a satirical sketch of a strong - by character and by body - woman with a penis.

These stories are not for everyone’s taste, but if you're a fan of Vicki Hendricks, you must read it.

Two-way Split

Allan Guthrie
Two-way Split

Polygon, 2007

Robin Greaves is a frustrated musician, who became an armed robber. He suspects that his wife is cheating on him with his partner. When private detective shows Greaves the direct evidence of affair, a burglar breaks the detective's nose. Greaves plans to avenge his partner, but before they have to rob a post office, which employs the mother of another hero of the book, Pearce, recently released from prison, where he’ve been for murder. Private eye with a broken nose and his subordinate Kennedy follow Greaves, hoping somehow to revenge. And none of them do not yet know what result the post office robbery will have.

A good book - not just a mystery, but in general any book - can often be identified by its unpredictability. So in «Two-way Split» in the graph «unpredictability» is 100%. How would be another: how can we predict plot in the book if there are three psychopaths (including Greaves’ wife) and two greedy private detectives there? All characters in the book are on the brink. They often despise themselves, but it's strong people, hard people, and with hatred and contempt for themselves, they live in, driving these feelings inward. It is impossible to imagine that Pearce, Greaves and even Kennedy can think like ordinary people. They probably are not under control of the thoughts and feelings, but some pulses in their head: «He gritted his teeth, squeezed his fists. When he closed his eyes, bars of orange flashed behind his lids. Maybe Ailsa was right. Maybe she should be scared of him. Women who were close to him seemed to have a habit of dying ». Guthrie chose the best description of the style for people such as Pearce and Greaves – it is entirely the impulses and movements. Short, abrupt phrases are the linguistic embodiment of such impulses.
Guthrie plays «two-way split» from the title on each of the three main characters of the book. Pierce is broken in half, breaking into a man who loves his mother as a three-year old child and able to selflessly defend the offended, and hard man who can kill with ease. Greaves breaks in half when he has a split personality after he stopes taking prescribed medication. A pair of private detectives, too, is divided in half: if Kennedy is more risky, with feelings, then a detective with a broken nose, as more experienced, finally lost his conscience.

«Two-way Split» is Allan Guthrie's debut novel, and it's hard to believe. The book is so masterfully written, so there is lots of energy here, that it can be seen: the author is a great writer. Very, very good book.

For the Dogs

Kevin Wignall
For the Dogs

Simon & Schuster, 2004

(Full disclaimer: I’ve read this book in Russian translation.)

Unknown assassins shot the whole Hatto family at their home. Only Ella Hatto, daughter of Mark Hatto, vacationing in Italy with her boyfriend, stays alive. When another assasin tries to kill Ella, the girl is saved by hitman Lucas hired by her father. Lucas devotes a safe place to frightened lovers, hoping to get through to Mark Hatto to take further instructions. Found out that his employer is dead, Lucas, conscientious hitman, who also has a daughter of Ella’s age, takes responsibility for her Hatto’s daughter. And when the boyfriend after what had happened breaks up with Ella, she asks Lucas to help her to find the killer of her family and take revenge on him.

I should immediately warn you that if you approach this novel as a realistic one, it can disappoint you. The author does not go into detail, the killings are committed too easily, the police, it seems, can not find not even a criminal, but even their own toothbrush in the morning. But if the novel is read as a parable about revenge, cruelty and punishment, this is a powerful book. At the beginning of the novel Ella and Lucas are the antagonists, the exact opposite: she is an innocent and defenseless girl, he is professional killer, with his own rules, but still a killer. Wignall gradually shows how the essence of Ella and Lucas begin to penetrate each other. Lucas, already burdened with a conscientious and complexes, derives from the girl love for friends, learns the importance of relationships and begins to look at his life from a different angle. Ella, while living with the killer some time, as if passes all human what she has inside to Lucas, becoming more hardened, and all the feelings inside her becoming dull, there is only a desire for revenge. Wignall depicts this transformation as a gradual phenomenon, like a tumor growing inside the human body.

Greed, envy, anger, meanness - it's all filling “For the Dogs”. Sometimes dogs are more human than people - and Kevin Wignall wrote about it this beautiful book.

The Seventh Black Book of Horror

The Seventh Black Book of Horror
Ed. by Charles Black

Mortbury Press, 2010

Anthologies, themed or not, almost always is a cat in a bag. If the collection has at least half of successful stories, then this book is successful. And it does not depend on big names on the cover: the same failure can be obtained from an anthology of small press and from large publishing houses. Previous collection edited by Charles Black, The Sixth Black Book of Horror, included high-quality stories, and this year, another anthology is not worse than last year’s one. Nine short stories (and this is bigger part of the book) here are if not masterpieces, then the strong work of the short form most writers wouldn’t be ashamed of. Accordingly, «The Seventh Black Book of Horror» can be called a good anthology.

The trend, which can be seen in the collection this year, is that a number of successful stories here are completely devoid of supernatural elements. They are not horror stories, there is more appropriate definition, and it is not even strange prose, but a wild prose.

Falls into this category, for example, the story of John Llewellyn Probert «It Begins At Home». Paul Reynolds is a photographer on the verge of despair: the family is sitting with no money and is about to be evicted from the house, - he no matter how should get an order from a large firm. But the manager does not like photos of the starving and suffering children - «The child isn't crying enough». Paul does not know what sacrifices he would have to go to get the job. Probert masterfully constructs the story, creating homage to the horrors of the 80s, but not using otherworldly forces. David Williamson's story «Rest in Pieces» could well be in an anthology of crime or neonoir, if the author would change the style of the narrative. This is the story of a pathologist, who develops a daring plan. You can’t read the story in all seriousness because black humor can be seen there a mile away. «Ted's Collection» by Claude Lalumiere can be attributed to the horror; it's just such a wild prose. This is the story of how cruelty and pain replace all the rest of emotions inside the people. Craig Herbertson in his «New Teacher» combined elements of old school horror, crime, dystopia, sprinkling it all with black humor. Biting story.

Joel Lane is as always lyrical. Here he presented with the story «Morning's Echo» about a detective who finds a missing person with the help of dreams. There are of course zombies in the book. In David Riley’s «Romero's Children» cause of dead walking was medicine of immortality. The ones who took the untested drug became zombies. In a story there is an unusual ending, though, this already stands out in a series of colorless zombie stories. The best story in the anthology was «Swell Head» by Stephen Volk (after this story, I sincerely believe that Volk probably is the best storyteller in Britain). It’s a grotesque story about a boy, whose head eventually is growing rapidly in size, and the body remains almost infantile, it is a perfect illustration of the phrase "we are responsible for those who we have tamed." The older brother of big-head freak sacrifices his life for the needs of the giant head. Volk is accurate in detail, and in the end gets an ace from his sleeve.

Do not be afraid of the word "horror" on the cover, it's just a collection of different stories of high quality.

Tumor

Joshua Hale Fialkov (writer), Noel Tuazon (artist)
Tumor

Archaia, 2010

Washed-up aging private detective Frank Armstrong unexpectedly receives a client in the face of the local drug lord. He asks to find his missing daughter. Armstrong wants to give up at first, but then sees in this business opportunity to earn money and somehow rehabilitate itself. The only thing that prevents the PI from doing his job decently is a brain tumor. Starting search for the girl with her boyfriend, Armstrong finds him in his own apartment - murdered. There appeares armed mobster hired by the father of the girl, and then suddenly appears disappeared girl, with a gun in her hand. Before Frank manages to do something, he loses consciousness from a brain attack. Thus, turning out between a hospital bed and in the street, leading the investigation, having lost the difference between past and present, Frank saves the gangster’s daughter and unravels the murder of his wife, committed several decades ago.



We have already seen a fair amount of amnesia noir, now we have a new, previously unknown kind – onko-noir. The tumor in Frank’s head gradually kills him, taking away the opportunity to think and live proper life. Detective loses his sense of space and time, not knowing where he is and what year. More frequent attacks lead to Frank coming again and again to the hospital, runs away from there thinking that next attack will definitely be the last for him. Events of past and present have become for detective a single entity. A reader can distinguish them only by art. Noel Tuazon blurs those panels, where the action takes place in the past, and conversely, uses dark lines, if it is present. Tuazon’s style makes this story very old-fashioned: it is a good illustrated pulp-novel, in which you never guess that the action takes place not in the 50s or 60s, but almost in our days. So suddenly you become surprised when there are mobile phones and internet in the book. It is not a believable story; it is a typical PI novel. Much more interesting is how the Fialkov weaves two plot lines in the end, allowing Frank defore the death to correct the mistakes of the past, not allowing history to repeat itself twice.



I should also mention the design of this hardcover (graphic novel was originally released in Kindle-version): between the chapters there are single page insertions, illustrating Frank’s headaches - pain, comparable to the shot in the head; in the end there are sketches, interviews with the creators and bonus story about Frank’s pat.

Fialkov and Tuazon in tandem have created an excellent novel.

Inherent Vice

Thomas Pynchon
Inherent Vice

Vintage, 2010

The ex-girlfriend of a private detective from Los Angeles Doc Sportello, long disappeared from his life, then suddenly appears, telling him of a plot to kidnap a local landlord billionaireWolfmann. A little later, Doc gets the client named Tariq Khalil, who asked to find Glen Charlock, one of the bodyguards of the billionaire. In search of Charlock Sportello turns out on one of the Wolfmann’s developments, where the investigator is beaten to unconscious. LA police detective, known as Bigfoot, later tells Doc that Charlock is killed and Wolfmann disappeared without a trace. In a nightclub musician Coy Harlingen tells Doc about the existence of schooner "Golden Fang", suspected of bringing mysterious goods into port. On the same schooner Shasta and Wolfmann has been seen. On the day of death, Charlock changed shifts with a Puck Beaverton. A possible reason for the disappearance of a billionaire is a version that Wolfmann wanted to atone for his sins by donations. Toward the middle of the novel plot becomes more and more twisted.

While reading this book you feel yourself the director Hawkes, who during the filming of «The Big Sleep» called Chandler and asked who had killed such and such a character, and you want to call Pynchon. Toward the end of the book the story just becomes cloudy, but you can’t call it a book’s flaw. If Pynchon would write only stylized detective story about the private sleuths, he would have been hissed and scattered with the eggs. But Pynchon writes novel-portrait of America of late '60s, a time when all from young to old smoked pot, when psychedelia rapidly penetrated into all aspects of life, when, no less, appeared the first beginnings of the Internet. All investigation takes place in a cloud of marijuana smoke, and no wonder that a hero and a reader lost in there. It is interesting to look at how Sportello as a hero of so-called PI novel. Doc is not Lew Archer, he does not help crumbling families, does not rake up the clients’ past, excavating old mysteries: in the novel he in fact had not a client at all, he goes on a wave, om an infinite groove. Dock is not like Philip Marlowe, Sportello is not a knight, he does not even have to solve a moral dilemma. He's too passive. But Doc is not a nameless detective from stories and novels of Hammett. He doesn’t have meanness in himself, doesn’t want to capture an extra piece. Groove, is what Doc needs.

Smoke oozes from the pages of «Inherent Vice». And this smoke smells of separation, pain, and bit pot. Yes, the pot, too.

Smokeheads

Doug Johnstone
Smokeheads

Faber and Faber, 2011

Four thirty-something-year-old friends go to spend the weekend at a remote Scottish island Islay. Adam is obsessed with whiskey snobish loser who wants to show the rest of them the place, which produces the best whiskey in Scotland and the friends all together can taste all whiskeys. However, the purpose of the trip for Adam is not only fun, he also wants to ask his friend Roddy to loan him million pounds to buy a deserted place on Islay to start there the manufacture of whiskey. At the bar four friends meet with Molly and her sister Ash. Molly is a guide there and remembers Adam from his previous visits to the island. Adam would not mind to start a relationship with Molly, but there is one problem - Molly's ex-husband, a psychopath and at the same time policeman Joe, who makes chaos on the island. When Roddy refuses to invest money in Adam’s idea - «Adam, you're one of life's losers, you always have been and you always will be. You're almost forty and still working in a shop, for fuck's sake. You've spent your whole life being petrified of taking a chance on anytning. That doesn't necessarily makes you a bad person, but it sure as shit doesn't make you the kind of person who runs a successful business either. You never take risks, it's that simple, so you'll always be one of the also-rans. You're a beta male through and through», - Adam gets mad and starts to insult Roddy in the car. Adam beats Roddy, and the latter loses control and crashes the car into a ditch. And this accident is only the beginning of the horrors that four friends and Molly will see.

Do not be confused by such a beginning, in which the original part appears only the presence of whiskey, but otherwise - like a mix of two dozen not the best horror movies. This book is the highest grade. It really is a horror without supernatural elements, and brilliant novel of black humor, and an essay on "how I spent the autumn", and 290-page sobering. «Smokeheads» has all the qualities of a good bottle of whiskey. This bottle hits you over the head so that long you can not recover, but at the same time, this bottle is not an empty container, within the novel - burning moisture. Johnston did not write a regular cliched novel with psycho cops, cocaine sniffing, burning people alive, but a book about the people on the edge, about that hangover happens not only from whiskey, that some events in life will not be able to forget, even get drunk in trash. For the loser Adam this trip to the island could become a turning point in his life. It has become to him but not as the way as he expected it. Roddy is more flippant, he is thinking less and doing more. Th most courageous there is Molly, it’s stranger, that Johnston describes her very sparingly, not letting even suggest what she experienced after what had happened.

«Smokeheads» is certainly a page-turner with the brilliant dialogues. Reducing the description to a minimum, Johnston practically with dialogues only reveals the characters. Gallons of black humor help to move rushing story. Convulsive laughing and absorbing «Smokeheads» to the bottom, to the end of the novel you at the same time are getting drunk from pleasure and sobering from what’s happening in the book.

It is recommended to drink this novel at one sitting.

A Razor Wrapped in Silk

R.N. Morris
A Razor Wrapped in Silk

Faber and Faber, 2010

1870. From school for poor children, working by day at the plant, several teenagers go missing, among them Mitka Krasotkin, favourite pupil of school founder Maria Petrovna. Maria Petrovna, the society lady and daughter of a wealthy father, concernes that the worst thing could happen to children, and appeales for help to Porfiry Petrovich (the same one investigator from Dostoevsky's novel). While Porfiry Petrovitch and his assistant, Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky are just beginning to look for missing children, when in Naryskin Palace during the theatre performance in the dressing room a society lady Elena Filippovna Polenova, recently engaged to Naryshkin Jr., has been murdered. The servants have seen former lover of the deseased Captain Mizinchikov running from the dressing room, smeared in blood, and the sister of Elena, Aglaia Filippovna, first sees a dead sister, and from what she’d seen she becomes ill, falling into unconsciousness. Police search for Mizinchikov and find in his apartment love letters between him and the deseased. Elena Filippovna asked Mizinchikov and then Naryshkin to kill her, but both denied it. Porfiry Petrovitch begins to doubt that the killer is Mizinchikov, but finds that the missing children and murder of a society lady somehow link.

Porfiry Petrovitch, moved from "Crime and Punishment" on pages of novels by Morris becomes a hero in already the third book of the British writer, and this is the final case for the investigator. Porfiry Petrovich is no longer master of interrogation one by one, but the master of the "field" work - he examines the headless bodies, pressed the dirty police to nail, almost dares the Emperor himself. A look at this novel from Russia, of course, will differ from the view from the UK, but we have to admit, despite some factual errors (such as the introduction on the novel the tsar, when the Tsars have been "renamed" to the Emperors), Morris caught the atmosphere of St. Petersburg of the second half of the XIX century. There are also a carriage, and fog, and the western industrialists, and secret police - and the level of authenticity is pretty high. Even the Socialists, and they have played their part in «A Razor Wrapped in Silk».

What did not work in Morris’s novel, it is to move the style of Dostoevsky to Morris' novel. Where Dostoevsky has verbosity, but such one that you cannot throw a word from a sentence, Morris has redundancy:

«The painting before him showed the skeletal structure of a dilapidated amphitheatre, golden in the light of a dying sun. The few isolated human figures were dwarfed by the great stone remains, which stood to remind them of the vanity of human ambition. It answered his souls's craving for an irrevocable solitude. Sometimes he believed that it was only the presence of other people, with their inconvenient desires and clamorous demands, that prevented him from being happy».

This style slows down the action, though Morris is very good at plot. The author hides a few aces up his sleeve, balancing between the historic police detective and the so-called «locked room mystery». The secret police wedged in the investigation, and one of the suspects became the son of the emperor, even, these surprises, perhaps, brighten a bad combination of style and plot.

The book will especially please those who have never read Dostoevsky.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Aimee Bender
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Windmill Books, 2011

The story of Rosie Edelstein and her family begins when the girl at the age of nine opens a possibility to feel during the meal the feelings and emotions of a person who prepared the food. Throughout the novel we will go the way with Rosie aged nine to twenty-two years old Rosie.

An unexpected gift (or vice versa, the curse) appears when Rosie eats a piece of lemon cake, prepared by her mother. In the cake the girl feels emptiness and desire to be loved. Rosie's mother works in the office, but after a while finds a job in the studio for the production of designer furniture. Rosie's father is a decent family man. A favorite in the family is brother of Rosie, Joseph. Joseph is a good student, steeped in science, but he speaks almost no one, he does not have friends, sometimes even the mother has to ask him to go for a walk.

Rosie is initially discouraged by her new feelings; she can not understand what it is. Food becomes her uncomfortable. The girl tries to explain something to the parents - something wrong with the food - but they blamed on the strangeness of her imagination. Rosie also explaines about the gift to best (and only) friend of Joseph George and George promises to help her.

This is a family story with elements of fantasy, fairy tale and satire on modern society leaves a pleasant aftertaste. Fantastic premise - an opportunity to feel the feelings of the people through food - in general is small and not too original, but the whole story is written so deeply, and the plot is built almost perfectly that delight quickens your breath. The book is successful because of unique style of the author, who managed to create a volumetric image of Rosie. The girl sees the world with naïve look, uncomplicated with adult problems and prejudices. Suddenly awakened gift plunges Rosie into the world of before unknown feelings and emotions. It’s interesting as the way a child sees her family from within, as the daughter notices the characters of their parents, as it reasonably relates to family problems - the gift of a great deal had taught her. «The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake» is also a book in a special genre called "freak family." Here is the ability of each family member, but not all of them open in their entirety. Rosie's grandfather knew people through the smells - and walked with a clothespin on his nose. Rosie's father had never been in the hospital, because he's afraid to go there: his gift has something to do with medicine, but the father does not want his ability to open. Joseph literally merges with the furniture and has gone forever from this world.

Bender saturated her novel with feelings, so it is impossible to remain indifferent to Rosie and her family. In the second half of the book, however, the gift of Rosie goes by the wayside, and even looks like excess. Bender concludes that even feelings in the world today will eventually be expressed in material goods. People are so baked onto the world of things that, if some kind of strange things appear, it knocks them out of the material world, they are lost and do not know how to behave. For example, Rosie's father is afraid to open his gift, because a gift can prevent him from working and earning money. Rosie's mother does not receive warmth and love in the family, and she more and more time spends creating things.

It's really sad book, you’re feeling like you’ve eaten a piece of lemon cake, cooked by Rosie’s mother.

8 Pounds

Chris F. Holm
8 Pounds

Self-published e-book, 2010

Chris F. Holm’s self-published collection includes eight stories, most of which has a solid weight, making the book, despite its name, much heavier than eight pounds. Holm writes in different genres: horror, modern neonoir, so-called "dark fiction." The word "dark" is suited the best to describe the entire collection of short stories.

Theme of childhood is very close to the author, and two story, opening and closing, are built on this theme. In the «Seven Days of Rain» in town for several days it rains non-stop, washing away everything in its path - including the secrets of the past. The protagonist of the story Eddie and his friends, when they were kids, played together, when their friend Timmy had an accident. The boys hid the body so that no one has found it. But the terrible flood washes away the remains of a body of the boy. One of his friends invites Eddie to go to the police and tell about what happened. But the secret of childhood days is even grimmer.

In the closing story «The World Behind» adult narrator at hot night can not sleep and remembers what happened to him twenty years ago, when he was a boy. His past keeps secret. The neighborhood boys teased him and mocked him. The boy began to seek refuge in the woods, where he meets a strange man who helps the boy to change his life forever.

«The Toll Collectors» tells the story of Ray McDaniel, the man of violence. For the first time in a fight in a bar, McDaniel felt a passion for violence and later went to work for bad people doing dirty jobs. For the cruelty they paid him good money. But here's the killer flees, hoping to start life over again, but go from himself is not easy, and the past catch up with McDaniel in the most unexpected way.
The best in the collection are the story with the title “8 Pounds”. It's brutal, exploding story about two best friends - and better to write no more about this story, so not to spoil the great fun.

In addition to excellent stories an advantage can be attributed, and it’s the price: it is not 8 pounds, it’s much much less.

The White City

Elizabeth Bear
The White City

Subterranean Press, 2010

The immortal vampire detective Don Sebastien de Ulloa, together with his companions – court - Lady Abigail Irene and Phoebe Smith, at the beginning of the XX century is coming to Moscow to heal wounds, but almost immediately gets caught up in the new plot. De Ulloa seeks a meeting with the artist Irina Stephanova, which was close to de Ulloa’s friend Jack Priest before Priest’s death, but instead the detective finds in Irina’s apartment a murdered woman's body. Not having to leave the room, the vampire is caught in the flat by local police. Learning of famous detective’s arrival in Moscow, the police receives help from de Ulloa in the investigation. In addition to fresh crimes, the vampire has yet to unravel the six years old case, abandoned because of corruption among the capital's police. The detective will have to face the thing much older than himself.

Bear breaks the time fabric of this novella (short novel) into small pieces, alternating stories about Jack Priest and his acquaintance with Irina Stepanova and immortal vampire’s seeking the murderer. In the chapter about Jack, we meet with a small circle of Russian artists, painters and sculptors. Gradually the picture opens the relationship between Jack and de Ulloa and Irina. Moscow, which the author devotes much attention, has been described here with all the care and respect to detail. In addition, plot takes place in an alternate universe, which differs from ours not only in the presence of vampires, but in the geopolitical situation.

Mystery is masterfully built here, in the finale we meet with even greater mystery.
Bewilderment after reading the book is caused just by awkward dialogues. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Bear was trying to combine the style of the transfer of Russian and English speech. The dialogues sound unnaturally, sometimes entering into confusion.

I am glad that Russia has become the scene of this exciting novella.

Collected Fictions by Gordon Lish

Gordon Lish
Collected Fictions

OR Books, 2010

The collection by Gordon Lish «Collected Fictions» includes 106 pieces of his prose. This is exactly fictions, prose pieces, which can not be called short stories, as well as diary entries, blog posts. You can still pick up a comparison: anecdotes. Collection of anecdotes, as ridiculous it may sound.

Despite the complexity (and sometimes transcendent) Lish’ fictions are the very oral stories, excerpts from life that can be called anecdotes. It may be objected that people do not talk like Lish writes, so his stories can not belong to the oral genre, transferred to paper. People probably do not talk like that, but Lish, better known as an editor, not a writer, does.

«My wife says, «Look at you. Just look at you. How can you look like that? Why don’t you take a good look at yourself? Look at me, don’t you have any idea of what you look like? What do you think people are going to think when they look at you? Tell me, how can you go around looking like that? Do you know what you look like? You couldn’t conceivably know what you look like. Who would believe anyone who look like this? I cannot believe what you look like. It is hard for me to grasp it, a man who go around looking like what you look like. What is the matter with you, don’t you know what you look like? You probably don’t have the first idea of what you look like. You act like you are completely oblivious to what you look like. Don’t you realize people are looking at you? Have you no conception of the fact that there are people who are looking at you? Why are you so utterly unaware of the fact that you cannot go around looking like whatever you happen to feel like looking like? Take a look at yourself. Just go ahead and just take just one good look at yourself.»»

Approximately the prose of such saturation fills this book. Lish does not give words to relax, and not just words - the whole proposals. Lish in his monologues looks like a sort of carefree old man, at times even seems silly, immersed in the everyday stuff. But this is a sham, because the author is working with a word, scrolls language through a meat grinder, and there is no question about any relaxation.
There is no relaxation for the reader as well. To read Lisha is like to comb a corn: an unpleasant, sometimes painful, but sometimes what a pleasure.

The beauty of this book is not on the surface, but it is worth reading all 600 pages to dig up this beauty.

(Books published by OR Books are not sold in stores and are available exclusively through the publisher’s website.)

The Blood of the Wicked

Leighton Gage
The Blood of the Wicked

Soho, 2008 (hardcover\paperback)\self-published e-book

When Dom Bishop Felipe Antunes landed in helicopter in order to address the assembled crowd, he has been killed by an unknown sniper. The Director of Brazilian Federal Police sends to Cascatas, where the murder occurred, the Inspector Mario Silva, and his nephew, Hector Costa, to investigate the important case - «You can't just murder a bishop. This is Brazil, for Christ's sake. Brazil, not some little Central American pesthole». A murder of a priest does not end there. A few months earlier in the same town there have been several murders of local farmers, and after Silva’s arrival in town someone kidnapes the son of the biggest landlord, who keeps in his pocket the entire region. Silva and his nephew also understand that the investigation will have to rely only on themselves, the local police led by Colonel Ferraz is mired in corruption and carry out the orders of moneybags. Silva gets caught in the middle, when long-standing enmity between those who own the land and those who believe that the land is owned illegally flares up.

Leighton Gage plunges us into the abyss of Brazilian life from the very first pages. The author is unlikely to deliberately trying to shock the reader, showing what the Brazil as it is, Gage just does not cover defects. And there are a lot of defects. The priests enjoy boys, trading their bodiesbody. Police officer to conceal the crime is ready to kill at least ten people - and he knows that he will go unpunished. At night you can not stop at a red light: you can be simply pulled out of the car, your wife raped, and you get to look at it. There you can be fired if they see how you talk to the police. Gage knows inside out of Brazil and he is not particularly optimistic: no matter how many criminals are caught, new ones will appear and reappear, like weeds.

The inspector Silva, remaining relatively calm throughout the book, has an interesting fate, he decided to become a police officer after a couple of young bastards killed his parents and the police did not even look for criminals, telling Silva quickly forget about what had happened.

Gage has written not only (and not so much) the social novel, but also a mystery of high quality. The author has placed under one cover a thriller with lots of violence with a very old-fashioned detective story. In the middle of the novel, these components do not look very organic, and despite the high passions, the author and his characters are like a little indifferent to what is happening. Let's hope in the next books in the series Inspector Silva will show himself as more emotional character.

Acts of Violence

Ryan David Jahn
Acts of Violence

Pan Books, 2010

Ryan David Jahn's debut novel by is based on real events that happened in New York in the 60s. Katrina Marino came back from work at night, when at the yard of her home she was attacked by a maniac with a knife. After leaving the girl bleeding on the pavement, a man has gone. Several neighbors hear cries for help, but none of them do not even call the police and do not go down to help a wounded girl. All the neighbors have their problems, bleeding neighbor is not on first place in their list of priorities. A young man discusses with his dying of an incurable disease mother draft in the army. Two married couples exchange partners in order to experience new feelings in sex. A black man comes up with a plan to hide the fact that his wife hit by a car a child. A man wants to commit suicide. While the neighbors themselves are on the verge of a nervous breakdown and Katrina is crawling on the pavement, hoping to reach her own flat, the killer realizes that his job is not finished and returnes to the scene.

Jahn in his novel uses a narrative technique, which successfully at one time director Alejandro González Iñárritu employed in his films: short chapters tell stories of each of the characters from the victim to the murderer, and the reader is waiting for a dozen different fates finally interwine, but this does not happen. All the neighbors, as well as the victim and the murderer, are united only by one house and one night, but there is no explosive effect, linking all the characters. The book's characters are linked not by action, and inaction, non-action. But these "good neighbors" (this is the American title of the book) won’t have to regret what happened. The events of that night will quickly erase from their memory. This did not happen to them, this happened to someone else. Jahn has enough skill and intelligence to not teach a reader a morality, the author is already reticent. He takes away all the unnecessary from the text, leaving the pain, fear and darkness.

In this gloomy book, Jahn shows how much damage can bring inaction.