DEATH PUPPET

by Jim Nisbet ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1989

Nisbet (Lethal Injection, 1987; not reviewed) presents 24 hours in the life of Mattie Brooke, a waitress who gets involved with drugs and murder in the sleepy town of Dip, Washington. After a night of wild sex with the satanic stranger Tucker Harris, Mattie gets fired from her job next morning over a dispute involving two other strangers--Scott Michaels and Eddie Mertz--who just happens to be looking for her boyfriend, Jedediah Dowd. Together, the three of them head out to Jed's isolated ranch, where Mattie discovers that Jed is hosting this year's American trade show of marijuana growers. As if that isn't enough trouble, Scott's and Eddie's credentials (in the form of an edition of Verlaine's poems) have been provided by none other than Tucker Harris, who's being held on the ranch after trying to break up the place upon his arrival. Mattie worries that Harris will identify her as the bimbo of the previous night, but soon she has a much more serious problem: Harris turns the tables on the pot-growers and, armed with the latest in portable weaponry, annihilates the rest of the cast and is even on the point of blowing away Mattie when she's saved (as a long epilogue makes unmistakably clear) by an almighty power, who chooses a providential instrument against Harris' devil so that Mattie can fulfill her vow to return to waitressing. Meanwhile, Nisbet unfolds this plot in prose that sounds like William Safire on speed--as when he writes of a wounded man that ""an unending string of curses emanated from his mouth in a foul concatenation of invective for which Catullus would compliment him at the gates of hell."" Underplotted and overwritten.

Pub Date: June 1, 1989

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Black Lizard--dist. by Creative Arts

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1989

Categories: FICTION