THE BLOW-OFF

A retired grifter finds a new trade as a B-level Brooklyn crime columnist.

Knipfel (Unplugging Philco, 2009, etc.) laid waste to the genre conventions around fairy tales in his last outing, the story collection These Children Who Come at You with Knives. Now he sets a full-blown beast loose upon the city with a raucous story of a reporter on the trail of Bigfoot. Launched with the sales pitch for a creepy carnival freak show, the book opens on cranky but self-amusing reporter Hank Kalabander and his wife Annie, wandering through the local carnival. Hank, who has some history with these things, finds the sideshow oddly disappointing. When Annie asks if he expected a real live monster, he sighs: “Suspension of disbelief problems, I guess. I’ve always been a sucker for sideshow banners. They promise so much, and they get me every single goddamned time.” With Hank’s day job, former columnist Knipfel gets to wax poetic on the (d)evolution of journalism and the media’s appetite for sensationalism. But he does it with the same pointed humor that made These Children such a treat. In Hank’s hands, the crime blotter for the local Pennysaver becomes a masterpiece of minimalism. “In every one-hundred-fifty-word entry, not matter how extravagant or seemingly irrelevant the crime in question, you had the makings of a miniature novel, with a clear narrative arc, heroes, villains, drama, conflict, and a resolution,” Knipfel writes. “Each entry was an encapsulated moment—a photograph—of physical or emotional violence in which someone’s life was changed forever. If approached with the proper attitude, the crime blotter was a reflection of the entire culture at that particular moment in history.” By the time Knipfel offers up the hook—a hairy monstrosity dubbed the “Gowanus Beast”—he really doesn’t need his sideshow attraction.

A funny and subversive caper novel that speaks the language of days gone by.