CROOKED

A second sizzler about marginalized outcasts follows Luna’s scalding but artful debut Brave New Girl (not reviewed) and falls in line with this publisher’s paperback stable of brilliantly trashy gutter novelists.

Old master James M. Cain would smile to his ear canals at Luna’s opening: “My mother picked me up in Holding and smelled like baby powder and Vaseline lotion when she hugged me.” Hardened but underweight young Melody Booth is paroled from prison after three years. White and seemingly allergic to sunlight, she hasn’t eaten meat in two and a half of those years and tosses her first hamburger in the restroom of a fast-food stop (“My cuticles were white and raw, nails bitten down, skin flaking off my fingertips like paint”). Though she’s a high school graduate, Mel turns down an office job offered by her parole officer and hires on manhandling smelly, sloshy port-a-potties, falls in with bad old buddy Chick Rodriguez, and sucks down six-packs. Living with her mother in Mill Valley, she sorely misses her brother Gary, who’s doing life at San Quentin—but she doesn’t want to see him. Did mother’s heavy abuse lead to her kids’ hard times? Mother’s changed for the better but is still a fake-pearls, lip-gloss airhead with a cleanliness mania. Memories of bad days at Staley pop up and hurt: being held down as a razor cuts the word juera into her arm and later slices fine lines in her vagina. And she gets her rib stove in. Why did she do three and Gary get life? The answer hangs over the novel. A hint: mother’s lover slaps Mel into the garbage; three years later, it’s payback. That crazy Gary. But that’s all, you know, like, cool, right? Sure.

No blue skies here. Cold-bladed realism that “gets all the little pink muscles moving under [your] skin.” And dialogue to die for.