Harley Altmyer is the main protagonist of Back Roads (2000). At the age of nineteen he suddenly finds himself responsible for his three sisters, Amber, Misty and Jody when his mother kills their abusive father. The atmosphere in the house is not exactly light and bright and right to begin with, but there’s still more vile darkness hiding under the layers of tragedy already obvious from that opening gambit. Harley’s hardly more than a kid himself, if a very precocious one, and he’s suddenly the legal guardian and main caretaker and breadwinner of this broken little family. They’re scraping by, but money is desperately short and Harley’s working two jobs just to keep them afloat. The coal town where they live in Western Pennsylvania is poor working class, mostly, and with that comes the same stubborn need to be self-sufficient that means you take care of your own, no matter the cost. All that is complicated enough, but even so things are still more murky than that.
It’s an understatement to say that any of the characters in this novel are complicated, or even complex. Harley himself has elaborate violent fantasies of sex and death even when he’s trying to be a nice guy. He talks about the abuse he suffered at his father’s hands in terms of his father only doing what he thought was necessary, but he can still understand and respect the fact that his dad provided for them materially. There are glimpses of the man behind the animal, the man they all loved in some way or another. You can get lost thinking about the intricacy of the way every single character is put together, blending light and dark, good and bad, the moral and the morally reprehensible until you get fairly dizzy from it. It’s all filtered through Harley’s awareness, and he’s not coping all that well. He’s a kid caught in the endless grind of two dead end jobs and a life altering trauma, who can still fall in love with an Impressionist painter and seek beauty in the plastic lawn ornament statues of the Madonna while driving around in his beat up old truck wearing his father’s hunting jacket. There are endless juxtapositions that seem to be contradictory until you find that these aren’t opposites at all, but aspects of character, some hidden and some shown in plain sight.
There’s also the slow revelation of what really went down the night their father died and their mother got carted off to jail, glimpsed in insights and revelations and flash backs that are small and seemingly insignificant at the same time as it is glaringly obvious that there’s more under the surface at every single turn. In that respect this reads like a very clever whodunit, but the psychological insight into patterns of thought surrounding abuse victims read like a case file and a character study. All these elements are tied together by an easy, graceful and occasionally lyrical prose that flows like water. It’s a beautiful and easy read, for all of how truly Gothic its subject matter becomes.
You have to find it in yourself to like Harley, who is by turns powerless to act in any constructive way and fully responsible and adult in his thinking. He is smart and capable and clearly a survivor, but he is also just a wounded little boy who has taken one too many hard knocks and can’t keep it together anymore. There’s caustic gallows humour in his voice as well as a kind of intentional cruelty and inability to do anything with the things he finds out. Whatever measure of love you find here it is thorny and twisted and deep, be it filial, romantic or bound by marriage vows. There are moments of intensity that could have been trite if they had been more carelessly handled, but one of the grounding traits is the desperation lurking under it all. Harley sees things so clearly, with a sharpness and acuteness that doesn’t allow him any leeway and at the same time he is wilfully, woefully blind to the central theme, until it’s too late and it costs him pretty much everything, up to and including his home, his dog and his sanity.
Tawni O’Dell has written an poignant, beautiful, complex and intelligent story that takes place in a landscape she clearly knows well. The literary voice is authoritative and fearless and there isn’t a false note anywhere in this text. There are themes of sin and redemption, of castigation and inevitability and the deeper dangers that lurk in the family bosom when it is as convoluted and warped as this. The sins of the father are revisited on the children in a literal sense and it is telling that Harley only finds some manner of peace, a way to be still and at rest, at the very end of the book when he has made his confession, seen the worst of what can happen and let it all come to the surface, like his therapist kept working towards. Even so, it’s not really catharsis, more of an immolation. What matters in the end isn’t that everyone comes through this in one piece and better for it, what matters is the truth and the truth is a rough beast indeed.
Mule
Dexter in the Dark – No Peace for the Wicked…
October 19, 2010
Dexter in the Dark (2007) by Jeff Lindsay is the third in the series about Dexter Morgan, a Miami PD blood spatter analyst and serial killer.
Me, personally, I am a huge fan of the TV-series Dexter, starring the talented Michael C. Hall. It’s easy to hear the sinister voice-over so prevalent in the show while reading Lindsay’s prose. There’s a cheerful callousness to the narrative voice that really appeals to me, if for no other reason than the fact that it is unique in its consistency.
I picked up my copy more by accident than by design at a thrift shop for next to nothing, idly passing my time scanning the bins of books, as any good bibliophile would. I remember what I thought of the first novel, so I don’t think I would have gone out of my way to buy this one had not circumstance been conducive. But, it’s like that sometimes.
It’s a good read, fast paced and easy and darkly funny. My sense of humour is certainly dark enough to enjoy the inner monologue of the unrepentant and cheerfully psychopathic Dexter Morgan, a man who is essentially not a man, which he confidently points out frequently enough to remind the reader that is sort of the running theme.
Dexter is certainly the master of the art of camouflage. To the casual observer he is a successful blood-spatter analyst, a member of the police, an upstanding citizen about to get married to his long-term girlfriend Rita and be a father to her two children, Astor and Cody, from a previous marriage. All that is just hiding in plain sight. In reality he is a serial killer, a psychopath and more than a little dangerous.
The thing is, Dexter has this second inner voice he calls The Dark Passenger, supposedly brought on by the bloody trauma he suffered as a young boy. I have no problems thinking of the lust for blood like a second voice, a sort of guiding personification of his own fucked-up psyche, but Lindsay has chosen to make it literal. By the end of this novel Dexter’s Dark Passenger is a demon, and his adversary in this novel is a demon of higher rank and power. It is given voice in third person passages where IT speaks directly to the reader.
Again, you can wrangle yourself around the idea that Dexter has reified his bloodlust, given it a name, made it a constant companion, all that. It even makes sense to me, knowing a little about sociopathy and psychopathy. But when there is suddenly demons in the works, real actual King Solomon demons… I get a little disappointed. Everything I like about this particular narrative voice loses from that, in my humble opinion. And again I am struck by that same thought that I had when I read the first novel.
It’s stylish and funny and briskly dark and the main character is so intriguing in his own right that I am disappointed that the story doesn’t go somewhere more interesting. I like Dexter. I know that’s not entirely healthy, but then, this is fiction and that’s the premise. Lindsay does a good job with it, that unapologetic and completely solipsistic way of viewing the world is skewed enough that it will keep you interested through the 375 pages. But the story, the actual narrative arc itself, is surprisingly trite, mundane and requires more of a willing suspension of disbelief than I can give.
Why did they have to be demons? I’ve read my share… probably more than my share, of gothic and horror. I have no problem with monsters. I know many of them very well. It is the other side of Dexter, the lack of humanity, that interests me more. When Dexter searches for the proper human response to a situation things get really fascinating.
“It was difficult to think of anything clever or even socially acceptable to say to that. I had never read anywhere what to say to someone speaking of having feeling in his amputated hand. Chutsky seemed to feel the awkwardness, because he gave me a small dry snort of non-humorous amusement. “Hey, well”, he said, “there’s still a couple of kicks left in the old mule.” It seemed to me an unfortunate choice of words, since he was also missing his left foot, and any kicking at all seemed out of the question. Still, I was pleased to see him coming out of his depression, so it seemed like a good thing to agree with him.” (341-342)
See what I mean? That’s where things about Dexter are the most intriguing to me. I guess I’m just a little twisted that way.
Still, it’s funny if you like your humour dark. And it’s different. And that makes it worth the while to read it.
MULE
The Joe Pitt Series by Charlie Huston – Vampires in New York
December 10, 2009
Charlie Huston – The Joe Pitt series
Already Dead (2005)
No Dominion (2006)
Half the Blood of Brooklyn (2007)
Charlie Huston has come up with a brilliant concept. You take the modern day vampire myth as we have come to know it through writers like Anne Rice and mix it with a good old fashioned hard boiled detective noir reminiscent of Raymond Chandler and set it in a gritty New York filled with vampires, zombies and regular folks and you get a very good ride.
The protagonist Joe Pitt is a vampire. He’s got the blood lust and the superhuman strength and the usual foibles and weaknesses and he’s about as cynical as you could expect from a guy who has been around a little too long and seen a little too much. The vampires of New York are organised in clans, like mobsters and they are about as territorial and dangerous. Each clan has its own philosophy, and there are all manner of politics as you could expect, and Joe gets caught right in the middle of it, despite being a rogue, which is more or less the equivalent of a Ronin – tolerated, as long as he is useful.
I’ve read three of the books in this series so far, Already Dead (2005), No Dominion (2006) and Half the Blood of Brooklyn (2007).
The first novel gives a good indication of where we are going right from the get go. The opening paragraph on page one reads:
“I smell them before I see them. All the powders, perfumes and oils the half-smart ones smear on themselves. The stupid ones just stumble around reeking. The really smart ones take a Goddamn shower. The water doesn’t help them in the long run, but the truth is, nothing is gonna help them in the long run. In the long run they’re gonna die. Hell, in the long run they’re already dead.” (Already Dead)
And that sets the scene. We get the dry commentary voice-over that conjures up a black-and-white old Marlowe detective story with all that that entails, like ladies with dangerous curves and chunky glasses of whiskey and rough villains and a mastermind in a silk suit with a silver cigarette case. This isn’t ever going to be anything other than what it advertises itself as, but – that being said – there are still quite a few ways in which it could be a whole lot less.
Huston, however, doesn’t disappoint. He actually pulls it off and then some.
You get language like this: “Color me pensive. Color me lost in thought and avoiding getting on the train, lighting a cigarette without even thinking about it, because that’s my story. That’s my excuse for why I don’t smell Tom until the fucker jams the barrel of his gun in my back”. (No Dominion).
For all of Pitt’s tough talk, though, he’s not just muscle for hire, even if it seems to be a role he finds it convenient to play. He’s fallen in love with a woman who is dying from HIV, and that’s another clever twist of the overall vampire myth seeing as how vampirism has always been compared to other diseases of the blood like syphilis and malaria.
If it seems like I know a little too much about the vampire myth, believe me, I do. I have read a lot of vampire stories, enough that they have their own section in my library. This is pulp, by it’s own admission. You’ll find Charlie Huston’s stories over at pulpnoir.com. Still, there is pulp and there is trash and the twain should not be confused.
This is smart, savvy, intuitive and intelligent pulp. It takes a lot of cues from a format you will recognize and affords the reader the pleasure of recognition at the same time as giving it a unique voice. There’s nothing wrong with clichés as long as you do something creative with them and Charlie Huston does.
The Enclave, for instance, are the mystics of the bunch. They believe that if they starve themselves long enough and thoroughly enough they will be able to walk in the sun. It just fits that there would be one group that went this way, became monks and tried to reach the next level, because somehow there has to be more to life than just this.
I’ve argued, and believe me it’s not always been a popular view, that vampires are trying to teach us how to die. Practically every vampire legend, story, or franchise always snags on the ennui and pointlessness of living forever. The toll it takes, the cost of giving up human society and all that we grade as natural always ends with a yearning towards death. In most vampire stories you come in either at the beginning, or at the very end, when the stake hits the chest cavity. It’s good to drop down somewhere in the middle and see what that might mean.
This is light, easy, bloody and enjoyable all the way through, provided that you have a taste for the basic genre itself. It’s also violent, dark and cynically funny. Above all it has a voice of its own, and that’s hard to find.
Mule
