Monkey droppings - Every Shallow Cut by Tom Piccirilli: "You're going to hurt yourself or someone else very badly."

Today, the monkey swings in on a vine of happiness, and swings back out on a rope festooned with hooks and blades.

So, ouch. Be careful, everyone. This one is going to leave scars.

Every Shallow Cut (ChiZine, 2011)

by Tom Piccirilli

They opened the car door and Churchill hit the ground beside me with a thirty-five pound belly-flop. Our gazes met and he gave me such a look of confusion and unconditional love that a sob welled in my chest and nearly broke from my throat. He snuffled at my neck and licked me twice and they went for the keys in my pocket and Churchill went for their ankles.

I had a flash, almost a premonition, where I saw that here it was, my very worst moment in a long chain of very worst moments, where I was going to have to watch them kick my dog to death. It was worse than my wife leaving me, it was worse than losing the house, it was worse than visiting the graves of my parents. It was going to be nearly as bad as the day I’d passed wailing protesters at Planned Parenthood following my wife’s staunch shoulders across the lot. They’d break Churchill’s back, boot him into the gutter, dance off with my father’s coins, and drive away in my car.

Church growled and hung onto an ankle, and the guy tried to shake him and bitched, “Fucking fat dog piece of shit!” His partners found it funny and started to laugh. I got to my knees and then to my feet, and I remembered that I was a man with nothing left who wrote stories about men with nothing left who did ungodly acts of violence against each other.

I wrote from the safety of a desk but the dark cellar door of my failures had opened and called me through it, and I found all my urgent whispering pain and hate, and I laughed again and they turned to look at me and I went to work.

Every Shallow Cut was released in 2011, but I didn't get to crack open its cover until one dreary day early in 2012. The next few hours were a blur, and when I closed the covers again, I knew I had just experienced something very special.

Brutal, yes. Violent, sometimes. Unforgiving, oh yes, and spilling over with despair. It may be one of the finest literary recreations of depression I've come across. As the title implies, every sentence is a razor, every word a shearing of flesh from meat. Every Shallow Cut is a nightmare of urban angst, the terror of losing everything to faceless banks and sneering creditors. At its essence, in its tone and style, it reminds me of nothing so much as the brilliantly unsentimental work of Jim Thompson (an author who knew his way around insanity).

But is it special? With a capital S. If I'd read it three days sooner, it would have been in my top reads of 2011.

The nameless narrator is a crime writer, once one of some renown, as references to critical acclaim and awards fill the scant exposition. Time has not been kind, and he is now down to his last dollar, with his wife gone, his career in shambles, his house repossessed, and him living in his car with his faithful bulldog Churchill. He is truly living out the death by a thousand cuts,and if this story is at all biographical, we're lucky not to be reading about Piccirilli on the front pages of the tabloids, or the imprinting of a headstone.

Piccirilli begins his saga at the lowest of low points, finding his hero being gleefully stomped by hooligans outside a pawn shop. But if luck has fled his life, resourcefulness hasn't, and after dispatching with the hoods he sells the last of his belongings, purchases a gun, and heads out on the road to...

To where? That's the fun (if we can call it that), as Piccirilli keeps taking left turns. The cover and bumpf led me to believe that this was an ultraviolent Natural Born Killers scenario, a man pushed too far, Death Wish in a car, that sort of thing. And I would have been fine and dandy with that, I love a revenge fantasy as much as everyone, and the author plainly has the chops to make that work; his prose is stripped of elegance and refinement, so unadorned it makes Elmore Leonard seem like a crafter of purple prose. But Piccirilli — an author I am unfamiliar with, an oversight I will definitely rectify — elegantly crafts his story into an examination of despair. It becomes a modern-day retelling of the Job myth, although God finally eased up on the pains with Job. Piccirilli is not so kind as to offer a way out.

Every Shallow Cut keeps the reader eternally on edge. There are no names to these characters save Churchill, no signposts to help the reader keep his balance. The narrator has no connection to the people he meets along the way. They are only "my brother," "my agent," "my pal." Only Churchill reaches through the emotional vacuum and makes a connection. He cannot even connect with his writing, as he compulsively fills notebooks with a story his pal calls his best, yet he has no memory of writing. As he goes from person to person, the elements of himself are sliced off as fat off a roast, leaving only a nub of gristle and bone to take the reader into that darkest of dark places. The last few pages are as bleak, suspenseful, and swimming with misery as any I've read.

But I fear I've scared you off. And maybe that's for the best. The thrills of Every Shallow Cut are not those that can be easily shaken off. These are not funhouse horrors; this is the sickening vortex of mental collapse, a slurry of paranoia, self-pity, unfocused rage, and unremitting sadness. I'm almost afraid to read more Piccirilli; not because of the terrors I'm sure he can conjure, but because I don't know if he could ever top this. I hope he tries, though.

VERDICT: MONKEY LOVES

P.S. This is another substantially amazing release from ChiZine, a Canadian publisher who has made a deal with Satan to produce the greatest genre fiction out there today. If you haven't read ChiZine yet, you haven't lived.

Monkey droppings - Precious by Douglas Glover - "I was left hanging, a dumb guy in the snow...mouth open and a one-way ticket to Nowhere."

The Monkey seeks crime in northern climes.

Has there been a murder? Has some stolen a moose? Has someone badmouthed Canadian beer?

So many choices.


Precious
by Douglas Glover (2004)

I count it a major personality defect, pernicious naiveté, if you want to give it a name, that after two decades of adulthood, a career in the papers, three marriages, and countless skirmishes with the perfidy of human nature, all I could do was look into her eyes and believe every word she said.

I would not hesitate to proclaim that writing successful hard-boiled noir is probably one of the hardest exercises that can befall an author. The language, the style, the atmosphere, it all has to be done with the utmost precision and care; it's just too damned easy to make the dialogue of the cynical 'seen-it-all' anti-hero seem false and forced, even absurd.

Example:

She was all curves, a twisty-turvy road atlas of mountains and gullies and bends and dead-ends. I made a note to buy a map.

See? Actually, that wasn't bad, was it? Really serviceable, in a humourous sort of way. But rather ridiculous.

Which is kind of my point; it's all ridiculous. Nobody is as cool as the shamus' and private dicks espousing equal parts wisdom and wit with the dryness of a perfect martini. It takes a special gift to make such statements credible, even memorable, and way too often a wink-wink-nudge-nudge sensibility can take over. Or worse, a slavish adherence to the form results in a far-lesser carbon-copy of the original, with no sense of an original voice behind the bone-dry narration. When reading Martin Amis' Night Train, I was reminded of a quote from the eminent Charles Emerson Winchester III: "I could play the notes, but I could not make music." Amis, hardly a slouch of a writer, was too constrained by the limits of the form, too scared to let any of his own unique voice into the mix, and subsequently could not make his story sing.

The unarguable masters of the craft (Spillane, Chandler, Hammett, Leonard, Goodis, Mosley) all have radically different styles, widely differing approaches to their subject matter, but their whole-hearted embrace of the genre makes their tales soar. They have the sensibilities for such stories, a sensibility that cannot be faked. You're either a poet, or you're not.

Another example:

She was a little Looney Tunes after finding the body. But she was also pretty and her smile was like an anthology of TV toothpaste commercials, and what the hell, in this world you learned to trust people who let their quirks show; it's the so-called normal ones you have to watch out for.

Now, that, to me, is a fine piece of noir. A voice weary to the point of unconsciousness, rife with sarcasm and bitterness, yet helpless to his base impulses. A reluctant hero who follows every lead because, for better or worse, it is what he or she was born to do. And it in large part is what makes Precious, by Canadian author Douglas Glover, such a damn fine piece of work.

Precious is Moss 'Precious' Elliot, a boozing newsman who is hanging on to what is undoubtedly the last rung on the journalistic ladder, toiling as the Ockenden Star-Leader's women's page editor. But after a life of three failed marriages, a jail term, and a journalist's knack for following leads no matter the cost, Precious is just exhausted enough to see the position as a gift.

Of course, no one as chilled to the soul as Moss Elliot can evade fate forever, and murder will always follow such chaps. In this instance, it is Rose Oxley, town snoop, stabbed to death in her own home. Rumours float about as to her having untold sums of money stashed away, but for Moss, interested despite himself, the only thing that matters is the truth behind the story, no matter the cost to others:

I was sorry, sincerely sorry. But I knew certain feelings wouldn't survive the next day's headlines. Mrs. Ranger had been operating on the principle that bending a sympathetic ear can be therapeutic. But I was no analyst; someone else was picking up the tab.

And as is per usual, the murder is only the tip of the iceberg, as there is a host of unusual characters, femme fatales, and red herrings for both Moss and the reader to sift through. As Precious gathers steam, and the scattered plot threads begin to knit together, the novel begins to resemble a Canadian Chinatown, a northern Long Goodbye. A mysteru with far more up its sleeve than mere murder.

Glover, a former journalist himself and winner of the Governor General's Award for fiction for his later novel Elle, has a great ear for dialogue and a strong understanding that such novels must be lean, mean, and unadorned by excessive language or sentimentality. He also has the gratifying gift for original metaphor and simile, another staple of the genre: "Jerry Mennenga's bar hid like an overlooked misprint amid a block of jutting bank towers not far from where the Toronto Star building used to be." "When he spoke, his voice sounded like furniture being dragged across a concrete floor." Lovely bits of business, those.

While Precious had garnered its share of acclaim at the time, it has, like so many other novels, fallen by the wayside, buried under piles of similar works that can only aspire to Glover's talent. It's a shame, and I urge lovers of mystery, tough guys, gritty dialogue and grunting protagonists to seek it out. Elle may have garnered all the attention (and yes, deservedly so), but you cannot undervalue the worth of a great noir.

VERDICT: MONKEY GRUNTS MANLY WITH APPROVAL

Monkey droppings - So Dark the Night by Cliff Burns: "Zombies vomitting maggots, blood-thirsty ravenors, that sort of thing?"

The monkey cannot come up with an adequate pun to introduce this review.

All out of monkeyshines today.

Wait...did that count?


So Dark the Night
by Cliff Burns (2010)

One of the drawbacks of being virtually immortal, the way the sins accumulate, across centuries of villainy, avarice and deceit. The victims who refuse to rest easy, their roaming spirits bent of revenge.

As I've said in previous posts (oh, go look them up yourself), there are a few themes and/or predicaments in the arts that always earn my affection. One is anthropomorphizing animals and/or inanimate objects, provided that it is done with skill and care and genuine wit. I will re-read Firmin and The Bear Went Over the Mountain and Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County again and again, and I will never tire of watching Toy Story and Babe and Ren and Stimpy. Conversely, I harbour absolutely no goodwill toward Hanna-Barbera cartoons, Garfield (comic or movies), Alvin & the Chipmunks, Marmaduke; you get the idea.

Likewise, I love a good hardboiled detective/supernatural mashup, and don't ask me to explain why, 'cuz there ain't no satisfactory answer. I will re-watch Constantine and Lord of Illusions and Angel Heart without tiring; Jeff Vandermeer's beautifully noir novel Finch was one of the best I read last year; I pray that William Hjortsberg will write more; and the mere mention of Clive Barker writing a Harry D'Amour vs. Pinhead novel sets my soul a-fluttering with joy.

So Canadian author Cliff Burns writing up a novel of jaded detectives with supernatural abilities battling lovecraftian forces from beyond? Yeah, I'm all about that.

Cliff came to my attention in 2009, when he introduced me to his collection The Reality Machine, a gritty and sublime collection of sci-fi horror tales that took few prisoners. Cliff has finally seen fit to personally release his first novel, one that has been available as a download for free on his website for some time. I'm normally filled with aversion to self-published works (see: Minnow Trap, Blood & Wine, and this deadly serious example of how unhinged some people can be, and you tell me I'm altogether wrong), but I'm willing to admit my failings, as So Dark the Night is a zippy, fun, and gruesome dip into the monster mash.

Set in the fictional city of Ilium, Burns' pastiche follows the adventures of Cassandra Zinnea and Evgeny Nightstalk, two "shades...nocturnal souls, temperamentally unsuited for the humdrum, nine-to-five existence of the 'Gray' world." The sun-allergic work as nighttime-exclusive investigators who report to a mysterious Old Man for detective assignments of an altogether stranger ilk than the usual. Cassandra is a powerful adept, capable of reading people, attuned to the spiritual realm, and inadvertently poison to electric appliances. Nightstalk, the narrator, is the brawn, a thug with a gift for storytelling, a passion for pornography, and a heightened ability to withstand (and cause) copious amount of violence. It is a strange pairing, but it seems to work, as evidenced by Burns' playful footnotes of past cases.

A strange case of murderous arson brings a mysterious society to the duo's attention. Soon, their investigations lead them to shadowy groups such as The Brethren of Purity, and as their contacts dry up, wither away, completely burst into flame, or much worse - "with one cruel tug, his personality and soul are ripped from his body, his essence gobbled up, the extraneous bits tumbling piecemeal into absolute nothingness" - the twosome begin to piece together a plan that could destroy the fabric of the world.

Yeah, it's one of those kind of novels.

While the ghosts of Hammett, Chandler, Lovecraft, and Poe are all well and accounted for, So Dark the Night is its own peculiar beast. Burns has a lot of twisted fun playing the collage of influences against each other, and he tells a mean tale smoothly.

I can't say that So Dark the Night is a perfect structure. Despite having the deliberate trappings of a hardboiled 1940s-era film noir, the novel is set in the world of today, with somewhat unweildy results; references to Pierce Brosnan, Robert Mitchum, DVDs, and well-appointed television stereo systems seem out-of-place, serving to jar the reader out of Burns' tale. Sometimes, Nightstalk's narration is too 'modern,' again a problem of incongruity with the overall atmosphere. The novel is, at times, too aware of itself as it pertains to its literary forerunners.

Yet So Dark the Night is inherently enjoyable, a fast-paced and occasionally grizzly funhouse ride. As hints abound as to other adventures in the duo's canon, it would be a shame for this to be Zinnea and Nightstalk's only literary appearance.

So Dark the Night from Sherron Burns on Vimeo.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES.

Monkey droppings - The City & the City by China Miéville: "Nothing are still like the dead are still."

Today, the monkey tries to see two points of view at once.

My brain! MY BRAIN!!!


The City & The City
by China Miéville (2009)

She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.

With a hard start, I realised that she was not on GunterStrász at all, and that I should not have seen her.

I can't speak for everyone, of course, but it's been a banner couple of months for me, in terms of discovering quality mysteries set in worlds that'll wrench your brain around and make it glad for the experience.

I've traversed the mushroom-laden streets of Ambergris in Jeff Vandermeer's Finch. I've gone colour-blind in Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey. I've trekked through the caverns of dreams in Jedediah Berry's The Manual of Detection. Speaking honestly, I didn't think I was up for any more bizarre literary worlds.

Well, shut my mouth, 'cuz China Miéville is on the scene.

I'm not personally familiar with Miéville's output, but I am aware of his stature as a fantasy world-builder of no small repute (his Perdido Street Station, set in his fictional world of Bas-Lag, has been taunting me to pick it up for some time). His newest novel, the detective mystery The City & The City (hereinafter C&C), is set in a new universe, one only a stone's throw away from our own.

But there are throws, and then there are throws. And Miéville has one hell of an arm.

C&C is, as the title implies, set in two cities. On one side is Besźel, a poor European city-state guarded in part by Inspector Tyador Borlú, of the Extreme Crime Squad. As O&C opens, a woman's body has been discovered, and Borlú soon learns that solving the crime may involve the authorities in Ul Qoma, Besźel's sister city. The cities have existed in a state of truce for some time, although there are constant rumblings from nationalists as to the unfairness of the truce. And if that was all there was to it, C&C would be an interesting police thriller set in an unusual yet familiar setting. While the physical descriptions of Ul Qoma and Besźel set one in mind of European realms such as Croatia and Serbia - war-ravaged regions of Europe that are slowly becoming integrated into the 21st century - there are signposts that mark this world as being very much like our own. People use cell phones, and the Internet, and they Google for information on their neighbours.

But the border between Ul Qoma and Besźel (and this is where it gets weird, and where Miéville's manic genius for world-building becomes obvious) is not so much physical as it is psychological. For the two cities exist in the same geographic space, and are kept separate and apart by each city's populace psychologically "unseeing" the other. Borlú explains it thusly:

How could one not think of the stories we all grew up on, that surely the Ul Qomans grew up on too? Ul Qoman man and Besź maid, meeting in the middle of Copula Hall, returning to their homes to realise that they live, grosstopically, next door to each other, spending their lives faithful and alone, rising at the same time, walking crosshatched streets close like a couple, each in their own city, never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border.

Each population lives in constant yet unnoticed awareness of the other, and the cities, while in the same physical space, are experience through unseeing as being distinct cities. "If someone needed to go to a house physically next door to their own but in the neighbouring city, it was in a different road in an unfriendly power. This is what foreigners rarely understand. A Besź dweller cannot walk a few paces next door into an alter house without breach."

Each population is kept in their place by Breach, a mysterious third entity that exists somewhere between the two psychological empires. To traverse from own city to the other at any place other than a designated cross-hatch is considered a crime, a breach, and Breach is summarily summoned to ensure that the guilty party is punished.

Yeah, it's a complicated world, and one that twisted my tongue more than once as I tried to explain it to friends. It's difficult to describe in a few words a world where people drive through border crossings and then "they doubled back, to the crosshatched streets in the Old Town or the Old Town, to the same space they had minutes earlier occupied, though in a new juridic realm." You try and wrap your head around that.

Luckily, Miéville has obviously written a map, and consults it constantly. C&C flows effortlessly, and its mind-boggling premise quickly becomes second nature, never drawing attention to itself except through its interaction with the story. For this is a story, and a darned good one, a police procedural with twists and turns as labyrinth as any one of the twin cities' shared back alleys. The cities are fascinating enough on their own, but Miéville is not out to create a Lonely Planet guidebook; he's telling a hardboiled noir police thriller, and excellently to boot.

It almost comes as a disappointment when Breach is contacted directly, but this was a risk Miéville had to take. I won't give away Breach's purpose or construction here, but there is an inevitable disappointment as a tantalizing mystery is revealed. Miéville never shows too much, luckily, and keeps the plot moving at a speedy pace that propels the reader through some crazy passages (including this reader's favourite, a foot chase down a single street between two men in different countries).

The City & The City is one crazy mind-trip, and an excellent mystery. Miéville may not traverse his new realms as deeply as he supposedly has with Bas-Lag (again, I'm going on the opinions of others here), but who cares when the result is this damned good?

Verdict: MONKEY LOVES

Monkey Droppings - Darwin's Nighmare by Mike Knowles

Today, we boil away society, leaving only the hardened nubs of humanity behind.

Darwin's Nightmare
by Mike Knowles
ECW Press, 2008

“People die because I live. I’m what Darwin dreamed of at night. Top of the food chain, no remorse.” – Paolo Donati

Writing hard-boiled fiction is hard.

Scratch that. Writing good hard-boiled fiction is hard.

Example:

I saw a woman in a fitted business suit make her way up the stairs. I imagined her at first to be a lawyer or doctor, but her bag was just a bit too shiny to be high-class. I pegged her for a working girl stopping into the clinic. Most of the working girls I knew tried to pinch every penny. No one wanted to work under men forever, and hookers needed condoms like offices needed paper clips.

See? All hard-boiled prose is just a hair’s breadth away from being completely ridiculous. It all comes down to attitude. The author must take the genre absolutely seriously, without a nod or wink of condescension. These are tough guys talking tough talk.

When it works, as in the genre-high works of Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, the first Mickey Spillane/Mike Hammer novels, or the early Burke novels by Andrew Vachss, it can be a wonderful thing. When it doesn’t, as in the later Vachss novels when he descended into self-parody, it can be a thing easily derided.

Another example:

She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida - the pink ones, not the white ones - except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn't wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren't.

That’s from the Bulwer-Lytton contest to pen the worst opening sentences from the worst novels never written. As you might expect, hard-boiled prose is a favourite target. It’s way too easy to make the gritty dialogue seem absurd.

The first example, by the way, is an early excerpt from Canadian author Mike Knowles’ debut novel Darwin’s Nightmare, an exercise in the hardest of hard-boiled that comes off wonderfully. Knowles never flinches, never jokes, never shows the slightest hesitation. His tale is one of bad people doing bad things, and damn if it doesn’t work.

Knowles’ anti-hero is Wilson, a hired gun who harbours no pretensions about the life he lives. Wilson is the seedy in ‘seedy underbelly’, the man who gets things done, the man who can utter threats such as “Anything funny and you’ll be dead before you hit the floor. The receptionist will be next, way before she gets from nine to one one on the phone” with absolute conviction.

Wilson’s terrain is Hamilton, Ontario; not the most obvious choice for an exploration of the dark, but Knowles makes it work. Wilson was brought into his line of work by his uncle, a career criminal who (in quite an original teaching method) instructs a young Wilson on how to live the life through a game of Pac-Man:

I watched the take and learned slowly to think ahead of one ghost, then two, then three. After too many hours I began to see the whole table at once. I followed each ghost with my eyes, learning how they moved. Soon I learned how they reacted, and then I survived them. They couldn’t touch me anymore. I made a choice not to let them.

Wilson works primarily for Paolo Donati, doing jobs that require muscle, smarts, and a closed mouth. When Wilson steals a package for Paolo, he thinks it as just another job, but when he finds himself being tailed, Wilson has to pool his resources and work out exactly who’s coming after him, and why.

Wilson’s world is a tangled weave of criminals, people who owe favours, and relationships that can be turned with a flash of extra cash. There are no heroes, only villains. Knowles brings this subterranean world to vivid life, anchored by the possibly sociopathic but definitely intelligent Wilson.

But as violent as Wilson gets (and he gets plenty violent, whoo boy), his associates are indisputably worse:

Tommy Talarese was as scary a human as I had ever met. He was a man who had gotten where he was through nights of blood. He reveled in cruelty as though it were a religion. Tommy had butchered entire families, raped children in front of their fathers, and tortured enough people to fill a cemetery.

As the pages flip by, and bones break, and tendons rupture, and blood spurts, and bullets pierce flesh, the crunchy dialogue and pungent narrative drives Darwin’s Nightmare to new heights of hard-bitten cynicism. Knowles’ Hamilton is one unrelieved by humour or compassion. Wilson is a monster, but he has become one to survive the other, far worse monsters that populate his world. This is kill or be killed, Darwin’s theory put into brutal practice.

Such tales of unrelieved pessimism can easily wear out their welcome, but like the best practitioners of the genre, Knowles keeps his story moving, his action clear, and his character engaging even when he’s been shot and possibly bleeding to death. Darwin’s Nightmare is fantastic, bleak noir of the finest sort. Knowles and Wilson are working together again in Grinder, and if Nightmare is indicative of Knowles talent, it will be a gruesome trip worth taking.

VERDICT: MONKEY LOVES

Monkey Droppings - Angry butterflies and raging toys; The Voice of the Butterfly & Amberville

Two novels today, one old, one new, each strange and bizarre, and both worthy of your consideration.




The Voice of the Butterfly (2001) by John Nichols

“We have become inured to the tragic consequences of human personality on a rampage, and our disinterest is casually destroying The Meaning of Life on Earth.”

John Nichols has sadly faded from public view as of late. While his New Mexico trilogy (including most famously The Milagro Beanfield War) is a justly-celebrated series on the ongoing rape of the land and the effects of said rape on its inhabitants, Nichols has kept a lower profile for the past decade or so, slowing his output, releasing a few novels to some acclaim but less impact. This is a horrible error that must be corrected.

The Voice of the Butterfly shows that Nichols has not lost his taste for satire nor his anger at the continuing destruction of the Earth. While the New Mexico trilogy had flights of craziness, Butterfly finds Nichols in full-on Tom Robbins mode, spewing forth sentences of breathtaking insanity and wordplay. You have to have a love of over-the-top writing to fully appreciate this novel, but if you are thus equipped, you are in for one hell of a treat. A bizarre, hilarious, profane, and tremendously entertaining rant, The Voice of the Butterfly is a raging voice in the wilderness, crying out for common sense and decency over money interests and rampant consumerism.

The butterfly of the title is the Phistic Copper, an obscure little insect whose entire existence as a species is threatened by development prospects. The Butterfly Coalition, led by lefty eco-lover and librarian Charley McFarland and his slipping-into-dementia ex-wife Kelly, is frantically trying to get the word out. The developers, a slimy bag of reprobates you should be lucky to never meet in reality, will do everything and anything to push the project through.

This is not exactly a subtle satire, and nor is it unbiased. Far be it from me to equate a character’s beliefs with that of its author (a charge often leveled against me for arguably good reasons), but when Charley opines, “If the radical right had its way we’d all be church-going polyester heterosexuals driving around in white Cadillacs eating meatloaf and wax beans while mammoth bulldozers leveled all our forests and even hummingbirds were extinct,” it’s hard not to feel that Nichols may be wearing his heart on his sleeve. When you combine that with the fantastic names Nichols comes up with for his characters—unwieldy Pynchonesque monikers such as Farragut Wallaby, Edna Poddubny, Charity Gingivitis, and Mookie Dirigible walk through the pages—you get a rollicking socio-political trek through both the worst and the best of America.

Like Robbins, there is just so much overt burlesque wildness one can take, and it can be somewhat tiresome after a while to see the well-meaning but limp liberals crushed under the unthinking monstrosity of Republican ideals again and again. But Nichols unhinged is an astonishing thing, and if you are pure of heart and stout of will, The Voice of the Butterfly is a weird, wonderful ride.

GRADE - B+

Amberville (2009)
by Tim Davys

"Here I stand, hiding, he thought, inside a stall in a men's restroom along with a drug-intoxicated homosexual prostitute gazelle who is particularly popular with the masochists of the city."

How, I ask you, could I not fall a little in love with a novel that has sentences such as that?

I have a true soft spot for the anthropomorphization of animals (animate and inanimate) when it comes to literature. William Kotzwinkle's The Bear Went Over the Mountain is one of my all-time great reads, with bear-turned-novelist Hal Jam a creation of sublime delights. Clifford Chase's Winkie, a dark satire involving a teddy bear accused of terrorist activities, was one of my favourite novels of 2008. Penn Jillette's Sock took the lovable sock monkey to deliriously obscene new heights. Not to mention the Douglas Adams-esque hilarity found within the pages of Robert Rankin's The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse, as a teddy bear detective tries to unravel the clues and save his beloved Toy City from a serial killer. And let's not forget that beloved graddaddy of animal satires, George Orwell's Animal Farm.

Tim Davys would initially seem to be taking the same tact as Rankin, creating in his new novel Amberville an entire city of stuffed animals who fear their eventual removal from the city when their names fall on the fabled 'Death List'. But as Davys travels the back alleys of a decidely unfriendly world filled with enough unsavory characters and degenerates to fill several Spillane ominbuses, the Swedish author shows his creation to be nothing less than a pure-blooded film noir mystery thriller sans humour to leaven the situation. These may be stuffed animals, but there is nothing cute about them. As a novel, Amberville is more in line with the dark noir of Gary Wolf's Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (a novel leaner and meaner than the movie adaptation [great though it is] would have you believe).

Eric Bear seems to have it all; a good job, a sexy wife in Emma Rabbit, and a lot to live for in Mollisan City. But his past comes rushing back in the form of Nicholas Dove, an underworld heavy who has discovered that his name is likely on the Death List. Nicholas wants Eric to have his name removed, or Emma is dead. But does the Death List even exist?

Amberville's main flaw is that, despite its trappings, it takes itself utterly too seriously. For a time, it is uncertain why Davys would even bother shoehorning the toys into a decidely classic mystery plotline. But it soon becomes clear that stuffed animals can, by their very nature, possibly unearth answers that more 'realistic' characters never could.

"All stuffed animals have asked themselves questions of life and death at some point, when young or old. Why must the factories manufacture new animals? Why must those who were already living in the city be carried away by the Chauffeurs? Why did they all live in open or concealed terror of what would happen in the next life? And who had established a system so cruel?"

By placing his gritty mystery into the framework of a breathing toy city, Davys is able to explore questions of mortality that a mere human sleuth could never hope to answer. Who are we? Who is our creator? Why do we die? A stuffed animal could hypothetically live forever, but the existence of a Death List calls into question tricky issues on morality and religion that could otherwise never be answered. And Amberville asks some questions that could make certain elements of society cringe with outrage. When Eric's brother Teddy muses, "Religion [was] a two-edged weapon. It was all a matter of daring to believe in the unbelieveable which in all other contexts was described as stupidity," it's hard not to wonder how some people might take such questions.

Which, aside from an assurity of plot and character, is Amberville's major strength. Aside from it's classic mystery underpinnings (done up in an often spectacular fashion), Amberville raises philosophical questions that encourage further thought. Amberville is a classic noir, filled with ambiguity, menace, and deceit. It also has a brain, and isn't afraid to use it in search of meaning.

GRADE - A-

A quad of reviews -Paul Auster, Sky Gilbert, Brian Evenson, Clifford Chase

Just some quick reviews today, to clear out the pile. But they're all good novels, with one certainly earning a berth on my all-time favourites list.

Man in the Dark
Paul Auster
Henry Holt, 2008

Paul Auster is a novelist known for taking chances. His New York Trilogy is a classic of post-modernist weirdness. The Music of Chance is a sterling character study. The Book of Illusions is a spectacular, romantic ode. Auster is not known for shying away from a challenge. But Man in the Dark is unusual even by those standards.

It all takes place in the space of one night. August Brill is an author recuperating from injuries sustained in a car accident. As he suffers through a sleepless night, he thinks up a story in an alternate timeline, where the twin towers never fell, and the U.S. has been split in a civil war over the Bush-Gore vote debacle. As the night wears on, the plot progresses, only to be abandoned by Brill as his grand-daughter starts up a conversation about the murder of her boyfriend.

Even by Auster standards, the plot of Man in the Dark beggars description. It has little form, and doesn't resolve itself rather than merely end as the sun comes out. But Auster isn't being lazy; he uses the rambling narrative as a device to touch on issues such as war, love, fear, and hope. In one night, Brill covers much of what North Americans habitually stress themselves into knots over. There are no clear-cut answers, and Auster doesn't pretend to have a solution. "The weird world rolls on," one character mutters, and that's as good a summation of Auster's alternately frustrating and magical novel as any.

Grade: B+

Brother Dumb
Sky Gilbert
ECW Press, 2007

Who is Brother Dumb? Many have speculated, but the best guess as to the identity of the famous yet unnamed memoirist Canadian author Sky Gilbert brings to life is J.D. Salinger. He makes mention of his initials, his sporadic output, his past marriages, his forays in religion; I'm no Salinger expert, but the parallels between Brother Dumb and Salinger are stark and unmistakeable. I don't know why Gilbert would choose not to mention Salinger by name, but considering Salinger's penchant for suing people who use his name (see his famous wranglings with W.P. Kinsella over Kinsella's use of Salinger as a character in his novel Shoeless Joe), it's a safe bet that Gilbert did not want the hassle.

Anyway, the novel is not presented as a mystery to be solved: instead, it's a character study of a man who considers himself humble but is anything but; who says he has a love of people but hates everyone he meets; who yearns to be a silent monk ("Brother Dumb") but in reality cannot shut up. Gilbert's author is a crank, a crotchety old man, and it's no mean feat that Gilbert manages to make the coot likable.

Gilbert's pseudo-memoir is a study in loneliness, and an unflinching portrayal of the temperament of the artist. The author never apologizes for who he is, and indeed, cares far more for his fictional creations than his flesh-and-blood acquaintances. There's undeniable pathos in Gilbert's exploration of how far man will go to have his real life emulate his imagination. The author is a lonely, lonely man, and mostly of his own choosing, but if he's insufferable as a person, he's wonderfully entertaining as a character.

Grade: A-

Last Days
Brian Evenson
Underland Press, 2009

This novel hasn't yet been released, but I can't imagine Brian Evenson being annoyed at some pre-publication praise.

Ostensibly a mystery, Last Days concerns the travails of Kline, a police officer who has recently been parted from his hand (and not by choice). After a series of mysterious phone calls, Kline is forcibly convinced by a strange duo to return with them to their compound, as he is the only person capable of solving a crime. What the crime actually is differs from person to person. Oh, and every individual Kline meets is missing at least one body part. And they parted from their appendages most willingly. I don't wish to give too much away, but when you learn from the publisher that Last Days is a lengthening of Evenson's short story "The Brotherhood of Mutilation," you kind of get a hint as to where it might be headed.

The cover copy presents Last Days as a "down-the-rabbit-hole detective mystery," and like Alice in Wonderland, Kline finds that his presumptions concerning morality and freedoms mean nothing in the situation he is in. Correspondingly, the reader is left as ignorant as Kline, and can only hold on. Last Days falls squarely in the genre of 'the condemned man who has not been told the charges', and is a sterling example of paranoid fiction.

What is Last Days about? Is is a condemnation of fanaticism? Certainly, the acts of Kline's abductors are cult-like, but Evenson is more concerned with keeping the reader off-guard with left turns, misdirection, and some gut-churning violence. It goes without saying, I dug it a lot. Evenson's plot is unsettling and eerie, an equal mixture of Franz Kafka and David Lynch. As Kline winds himself deeper and deeper into Evenson's labyrinth (is the book really only 170+ pageslong?), his options for extricating himself become fewer, especially when he finds himself between warring factions. The ultimate ending, a complete abandonment of the self, is severe and uncompromising, somehow reminding me of the bleak despair of the finale of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, as Neville submits to his fate and becomes the monster.

Last Days is gruesome, perplexing, reprehensible, cruel, and freaking marvelous. I'll be tracking down Evenson's other novels ASAP.

Grade: A-

Winkie
Clifford Chase
Grove Atlantic, 2006

When I stopped and thought about it, I was struck not so much by how much Winkie reminded me of the works of William Kotzwinkle, but more by how few authors use Kotzwinkle as a template. Kotzwinkle has been a preeminent satirist for much of his writing career, and many could learn from his unique sensibilities. Yes, it's all well and good to emulate Vonnegut (register him for sainthood, in my opinion), but Kotzwinkle's novels offer delights both sublime and ridiculous. As does Winkie, a charming, shaggy, ultimately heart-rending tale of the yearning for freedom in a society that craves its scapegoats.

Winkie is a teddy bear with a dream: freedom. After decades of entrapment as a immobile object, Winkie takes it upon himself to leap to his feet and take action, running to the woods, living off the land, and somehow giving birth to a daughter, Baby Winkie. However, fate is indeed cruel, as Winkie becomes mistaken for a unabomber-style terrorist and is tried in a kangaroo court so outrageous it makes the Guantanamo trials seem reasonable and well considered.

Winkie is a bizarre little creature, both as cuddly object of childhood adoration and as literary object of my adoration. It's part allegory for the insane times we live in, with our fear of the other and our incessant need to blame others for our problems. It's part exploration of the outsider. But Winkie's true heart lays in Chase's plea for acceptance and tolerance. Winkie may be a bear, but he's far more rational a being than most people, and far more accepting of the world's mysteries. Winkie's journey is a journey every thinking being must take, and it's rather frightening that a teddy bear is more equipped to deal with the world than most functioning adults.

Winkie is, for me, that rarest of novels: a novel I wish I had written. There's magic in it.

Grade: A+