Book Reviews by Elizabeth A. White

My introduction to books as a child was in the crowded and cramped Galway City library. It occupied the second floor of the court house complex built by the British in the nineteenth century. On the portico high above street level the British gave it the ultimate imprimatur by installing a Royal coat of arms carving, featuring the lion and unicorn on either side of the great shield, which looked down on the colonized peasantry of Galway.

Many prisoners were taken from there for the short journey across the Corrib to the City Gaol and then onto the even shorter journey into infinity – hanged at dawn and buried in the goal precincts. The bodies were disinterred in the 1960s when it was demolished to make room for the ostentatious Galway Cathedral. A marginal improvement some would say.

To get to the library on the second floor I had to negotiate a phalanx of prisoners in handcuffs and chains, prison warders, Gardai, lawyers, solicitors, relatives of the victims and accused and a blue grey haze of cigarette smoke that penetrate your cloths as you pushed your way through the crowds and then up the long wooden staircase to the haven of the library. Hence my early and abiding interest in crime fiction was born.

After the big earthquake and tsunami in the Tōhoku region north of Tokyo last year, I felt like I very much wanted to give something back to Japan, a place that’s been my home for the past 11 years – a place that’s equal parts inspiring and puzzling, a fascinating collusion of kitsch and cool, with a history ten times longer than that of my home town, Melbourne.

One Hundred Years of Vicissitude was originally an idea I toyed with in 2007, and then shelved while I finished off Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat.

Some of the original notes did make it through to the final version, but at least 98 percent was written between September 2011, and April 2012 – and the tone is completely different.

The novel was swayed as much by family (my late grandfather Les, my wife Yoko and my six-year-old daughter figured significantly in its composition) as it is by my two ‘home’ towns of Tokyo and Melbourne.

Aside the essential story of identical twin geisha, war, death and saké, other things weighed in on the mix and I’ve decided to outline some of these here, as they deserve all the kudos they can get.

The 23 short stories in Allen’s debut, Back Roads & Frontal Lobes, more than demonstrate that Allen not only talks the talk, but walks the walk when it comes to confronting the often ugly truths about humanity in his fiction. The characters in Allen’s stories don’t just skirt the line of decency and civility, they treat it as the starting line for a race into the dark and profane, the surreal and disturbing.

The book’s namesake story, “Back Roads and Frontal Lobes,” manages to combine all of the above in one massive wallop. Temple Hannigan isn’t quite sure where he’s going, he just knows he can’t get there fast enough. As he drives the highway one night trying to outrun the memory of a cheating wife and a man brutally beaten to death, Temple finds himself taking the exit for Death City. The disturbing things that await him there are eclipsed only by the massive swerve ending Allen serves up.

“Not Over Easy” is a truly odd duck of a story, which I mean in a good way, one involving the last days of a dying man… or is he? Though afflicted with a seemingly never-ending nosebleed and eager to tell everyone whose path he crosses that he’s dying, the reader is never quite sure whether the story’s lead is actually dying, or whether the affliction from which he suffers is more of the mental variety. Flashbacks to disturbing events from the man’s youth only underscore the uncertainty. One thing is for sure, you’ll never look at the runny yoke of your eggs over easy quite the same way again, I assure you.

Last year Elizabeth invited me to write about the Lost Children Charity Anthology, where I collected 30 stories from a flash fiction challenge issued by Fiona Johnson and Ron Earl Phillips. It has great stories by Paul D. Brazill, David Barber, Chad Rohrbacher, Veronica Marie Lewis-Shaw, Lynn Beighley and many more. We raised over $1700 for two children’s charities with that book. It continues to be a great success.

But I’m the kind of guy who always looks for what he could have done better. Two months after it was published, I decided to do another one. I’d focus on one cause and I’d invite many of the new authors I met at Bouchercon 2011 and online. A year later, I’m back, to let you know that I can really shake ‘em down:

Protectors: Stories to Benefit PROTECT gathers 41 writers to support one cause: protecting children, through sane and effective legislation. The first book collected flash fiction; this one has one page poems to novellas. Crime, noir, westerns, thrillers, weird tales, horror, urban fantasy and transgressive lit. An exclusive first three chapters from Ken Bruen’s novel, Spectre in the Galway Wind. An Edgar finalist that hasn’t seen print since 1984. Joe Lansdale contributed a story from Hap’s childhood. George Pelecanos sent a story while he was busy on the set of Treme.

The reaction was stunning, and putting it all together was the biggest challenge I’ve faced as a writer to date. How tough was it? It was a lot of work. But as they say, a labor of love. I had to hunt down writers through publicists or query them via email. I had to scan an old typewritten story in and correct it line by line. I like to think I’ve become a much better editor of my own work after editing 40 other writers. And it sure made me more amicable to being edited, after being on the other side of the red pen, so to speak.

“Don’t go there. Don’t go there . . .” That’s what a friend of mine told me she found herself saying while reading several of the stories in my new collection, Back Roads & Frontal Lobes. And then she told me that she knew I would, anyhow.

Of course I would. Some people want you to. To go there, that is. More than will admit it.

There’s an argument that Stephen King makes in an essay that appeared first in Playboy thirty years ago. He works from the question of why it is that we love horror movies. His answer, in part, is this: “I think that we’re all mentally ill.” And he adds that we’ve got to “. . . keep the gators fed.” It’s a crude but very logical and nuanced argument that goes well beyond these statements, but that’s the heart of it. Part of our nature leans toward being uncivilized.

There are things about being human that most people don’t like to talk about. We have to be civilized, right? We have laws and all that. And judgmental people. And laws and judging can seriously fuck with our lives. Civility makes society work better.

(But it doesn’t stop us from being human, or human animals.)

If fiction is supposed to be honest (lies that reveal the truth about humanity is what we’ll call fiction in creative writing classes) then, honestly, what does being civilized have to do with it, sometimes? Being civilized is our attempt to cover up the sordid honesty that might fill our streets with blood and our bedrooms with orgies—or the other way around.

That disturbing yet eloquent line opens “His Footsteps are Made of Soot,” one of my favorite stories in Nik Korpon’s recently released collection Bar Scars. The nine stories which form the collection clock in collectively at around 80 pages, and every one of them has clearly been crafted with the utmost care. As with any collection, however, there were a few that particularly stood out to me.

“Alex and the Music Box” finds a guy sneaking back into his ex-girlfriend’s apartment to retrieve the music box he’d given her. But instead of getting in and out with surgical precision, he lingers a bit too long and finds himself trapped when his ex returns from a night out at the bars…and she’s not alone.

The tension in this one is nearly unbearable, as Korpon paints his lead into a corner – or under a bed as the case may be – leaving both the poor guy and the reader to wonder how he’s getting out without getting caught. This being a Korpon story, however, we quickly realize that under the bed was probably the best place for the burglar boyfriend to be, as things go from awkward to alarming upon his emergence from hiding.

“His Footsteps are Made of Soot” is the story I think perhaps best captures the mixture of grit and eloquence which makes Korpon’s writing so intoxicating. The story’s lead works as the assistant to an off the books surgeon who performs procedures in his less than sterile basement operating theater. I mean, one should seriously rethink their desire for cheap elective surgery when their doctor works with such sophisticated equipment as filet knives and tongs, a corkscrew and melon baller, fishing line and a nitrous oxide tank covered in clowns.

Once a promising boxer, American Kelly Courter found himself in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico after his dance with drugs and alcohol resulted in a horrific accident he chose to flee from rather than face the consequences. He still boxes, though now it’s his job to play the role of human punching bag for up-and-coming young Mexican fighters in unsanctioned smoker fights.

He also makes a little money on the side by helping his friend Estéban sell marijuana and repackaged prescription pills bought dirt cheap from farmacias and sold at tremendous markup to clueless turistas. It’s not an ideal existence by any stretch of the imagination, but Kelly does have one bright spot in his life, Estéban’s sister, Paloma, with whom Kelly is involved.

Though Paloma is romantically involved with Kelly, her passion lies with Mujeres Sin Voces, an organization dedicated to seeking justice for the countless young women of Ciudad Juárez who go missing every year. Sometimes the women are found murdered, but more often than not they simply disappear, never to be seen again. The polícia are no help, they more than have their hands full fighting a losing battle against the drug cartels, leaving the families of the missing to seek what justice they can on their own.

I’d heard a while back that Chuck Palahniuk cited The Great Gatsby as his inspiration for Fight Club. I didn’t know enough at the time to see the rationale behind it—this was somewhere round 2005—but after I began to take writing seriously (and by necessity, reading) it started to make more sense. I could see the threads that strung the novels together. Man, I wish I could do something like that, I thought as I sunk back into my stack of Garcia Marquez books.

Flash forward five years and I’m collecting stories for my Snubnose Press collection, Bar Scars, reading through (okay: skimming) everything I’d written since 2009. By this time, I had three novels (though one is now a lovely doorstop and the other in submission-limbo) three novellas and a couple dozen shorts on my Mac. The voyeurism I felt while revisiting things I’d written at the beginning of my career (if you can call it that) notwithstanding, what really struck me was the way all of these places coalesced in my head. There were a ton of bars and building sites, a cadre of reprobates and lowlifes and schemers, all of which not only made Baltimore seem like that much worse of a city, but also began to feel repetitive. When I began writing, I thought it was cheating to write about the same people in different stories. I thought each story had to have its own universe and cast of characters. So, instead of cheating I just changed the names and locations. Which, you know, was pretty much the cheating I was trying to avoid.

The 10 most challenged titles of 2011 were:

ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r by Lauren Myracle. Reasons: offensive language; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group.

The Color of Earth by Kim Dong Hwa. Reasons: nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group.

The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. Reasons: anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; violence.

My Mom’s Having A Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy by Dori Hillestad Butler. Reasons: nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Reasons: offensive language; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group.

Alice by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. Reasons: nudity; offensive language; religious viewpoint.

The idea that God is dead and the Devil is running wild is one that the characters in Vile Blood have every reason to embrace. Deputy Sheriff Gene Martindale and his sister, Skye, lost their parents to unspeakable violence when Skye was still a toddler and Gene hardly into his teens. More recently, Gene’s wife and their unborn child were killed in a most gruesome manner by two members of a cult, leaving Gene, his young son, and a now seventeen-year-old Skye to cling together as a family unit.

But as horrific as their past is, their future holds far worse. When four men passing through the town decide to give Skye a hard time – or worse – one night as she’s walking home from her job at the town’s diner something in her snaps. Something monstrous, powerful, and evil. Something Skye always knew on some level was there, but which she’d fought desperately to keep contained. Something she calls The Other.

Confronted the following morning with the resulting abattoir-like scene along the side of the road, Gene knows he’s looking at something he’s seen before and had hoped to never see again. Something he knows was caused by his sister. Something he has no idea how to deal with, but knows he somehow must. Unfortunately, things go from worse to screwed when the Sheriff of the neighboring county, a man who worked the Martindale family crime scene 15 years prior, also realizes there’s something familiar about the carnage and, upon finding Skye’s broken glasses amongst the gore, makes the connection between the two massacres.

In an interview years ago the great American crime writer Donald E. Westlake talked about writing his brilliant Parker novels under the alias Richard Stark. He said that when he sat down to write as Stark he felt different. Thought differently. Wrote differently.

This always intrigued me and last year, when—out of nowhere—I had the glimmer of an idea for the horror novel that became Vile Blood, I knew I could never write it as Roger Smith. I needed to access another part of myself, dredge up a very different set of memories, influences and obsessions from the ones that fuelled my South African crime novels.

So Max Wilde walked in the door one day, sat down at my computer and started writing. Before dark he slipped away but he came back the next day and the next; spent months hunched over my laptop, hammering at the keyboard like a man possessed. Then he disappeared, leaving a file sitting on my hard drive. When I read those pages I was fascinated by what this other guy had jacked into and the memories that he was stirring up.

I was a kid in apartheid South Africa in the late 60s and 70s, a repressive time. The country was run by an Afrikaner Calvinist dictatorship and hand-in-hand with their sick racial policies went a suffocating Puritanism and sexual repression. Censorship was draconian, especially when it came to sex. Forget about reading D.H. Lawrence or William Burroughs or Nabokov’s Lolita. Sex scenes in Hollywood movies were chopped out with little regard to the narrative.

But violence was okay. Violence was part of South Africa’s frontier birthright, after all. So horror novels, comics and movies slipped under the censor’s radar.