A briskly paced, splatter-filled crime novel to delight fans of directors Tarantino and Rodriguez.
A murderous, thieving werewolf gets tripped up plying his trade when he’s co-opted by a shadowy cabal.
Tattoo artist, musician, and writer Johnson chronicled his colorful life in a memoir, Tattoo Machine (2009), and here makes his first foray into fiction with a nasty, snarling bit of supernatural noir that’s reminiscent of the more gruesome novels of Chuck Wendig or Joe Hill. The protagonist of this Portland-based crime novel is Gelson Verber, a century-plus-old half-breed werewolf who’s learned a few tricks in his day but who's kind of having a bad run. “The Experiment wasn’t working,” he confesses as the book opens. That particular treatment involved damping down his furry ferocity by downing fistfuls of tranquilizers, gallons of scotch, and the not-so-occasional roofie. Gelson plies his trade by hunting down local scumbags and selling their belongings to his fence, Lemont. Things go awry when he encounters one Linda Morgan, aka “Miss Misery,” an employee of the mysterious Salt Street Development company. There, he learns that not only do they know who he is, but they also know what he is—and they intend to blackmail him into doing their dirty work for them. It’s here that Gelson finally meets another of his kind, Christophe, a werewolf who is faster, stronger, and far more dangerous. But it turns out there’s more to Gelson Verber than meets the eye. As the hard man of this particular slice of genre, the guy is a fantastic character: ruthless but not without humor, a master grifter who’s been doing this a very long time, and a stone-cold killer whose methods can be shocking even within the pages of this horror/crime fusion. Along the way, Johnson throws in Gelson’s target, a communications magnate who has gotten on Christophe’s bad side; Izelle Tatum, a savvy transsexual who’s only hustling to make the bread for sex-reassignment surgery; and a pair of plot reversals that are likely to leave readers with their jaws on the floor.
A briskly paced, splatter-filled crime novel to delight fans of directors Tarantino and Rodriguez.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-593-76648-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.
When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel’s earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival.
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56202-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.
Edgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material sliced off the front pages.
The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts most of the stories in this debut collection. Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what pundits label our “ongoing racial dialogue” a deadpan style, an acerbic perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers’ expectations. “The Finkelstein 5,” the opener, deals with the furor surrounding the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five black children with a chainsaw. The story is as prickly in its view toward black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots pressing for an acquittal. An even more caustic companion story, “Zimmer Land,” is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on sight, or “problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. Such dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: “The Era,” for example, identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a controlled substance called “Good.” The title story, meanwhile, riotously reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes fear it could be in real life. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions are, there’s more in Adjei-Brenyah’s quiver besides tough-minded satire, as exhibited in “The Lion & the Spider,” a tender coming-of-age story cleverly framed in the context of an African fable.
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-91124-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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