Slide - Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

 Slide is the second in Bruen and Starr's Max & Angela Trilogy and every bit as much fun as the first (see Bust, reviewed 30.11.25).   Max, broke and unemployed, finds himself in an Alabama motel celebrating July 4 being shagged by a Chinese guy.   Angela is back in Ireland, having spent the money she stole from Max, and back on the game.   But every setback is the prelude to a new opportunity.   Max figures out that the desk clerk at the Golden Star Motel is selling crack and muscles in on the game; Angela gets picked up by a wannabe serial killer who goes by the soubriquet Slide.

Obviously, things are not always coming up roses.   Detective Miscali still wants Max for the murder of his partner in Bust, and Slide's slapdash methods force him and Angela to gravitate back to New York, where Max is happily turning on his contacts from the computer business to the wonders of crystal meth.   But Kyle, the desk clerk, comes to the Big Apple with news that his Colombian friends want to meet Max in person.   Max's live-in lapdancer Felicia plans to hijack the meeting with her cousin Sha Sha and at the same time briefs Detective Miscali on the meet.   Kyle, a little naive, has been introduced to the wonders of sex by both Felicia and Angela.   They in turn have been introduced to Kyle's prodigious member, which in itself becomes a plot point in the tale.

What can possibly go wrong?   It's a question that obviously answers itself.

Like I say, great fun.   I've still got the third part, The Max, to read in this collected version from Hard Case Crine.   They also do Pimp by Bruen and Starr and at least one solo work by Starr.   Hard Case however have got a new issue by Joyce Carol Oates, whose The Triumph of the Spider Monkey first introduced me to the publishing house, due out any day now.   That, I feel sure, will be my next acquisition.

The Triumph of the Spider Monkey - Joyce Carol Oates

Hard Case Crime, my favourite brand of the moment, have really branched out. They now publish Stephen King and, that most literary of American writers, Joyce Carol Oates. I love Joyce Carol Oates and have done since I came across one of her earliest stories (pre-1973) in a collection from the Transatlantic Review..

What we have here is a novella from the same period, when Oates was still experimenting in authorial voice, and a shorter, linked novella from a couple of years later which has only ever been published in a literary journal.

The Spider Monkey is Bobbie Gotteson, abandoned as a new-born in a locker at the bus station. Bobbie is raised in care and detention centres, with the inevitable consequences. Upon release as a man of around thirty, but still looking young if a little monkeyish, he drifts out West with his guitar and vague dreams of becoming a star. Instead he turns into something not unlike Charles Manson, who was still on trial when Oates conceived the story.

It must be stressed, though, that Bobbie is not Charlie. He keeps his mystic powers to himself and his disciples are all in his head. But we know from the start that he is on trial for a series of murders. Among them is a houseful of air stewardesses, only one of whom has escaped. She is Dewaline, who features in the other novella, 'Love, Careless Love,' in which another footloose young drifter, Jules, is hired by persons unknown, to spy on her - for reasons unknown - as she attends to give evidence at Bobbie's trial.

Jules cannot resist approaching her. Dewaline assumes he is the driver hired (again, by persons unknown) to take her north after the trial. On the road, they become as involved as two alienated young people can be.

Oates is always worth reading. These early works are fascinating - experimental, multi-voiced, moving by jump-cuts like a post Easy Rider movie. Together, they are like reading a gonzo report from the frontline of the death of the Sixties dream.

A Book of American Martyrs - Joyce Carol Oates

I don't know how she does it. Joyce Carol Oates has been writing novels for 54 years. To all intents and purposes she publishes one a year. Not only does she show no sign of flagging, she just gets better and better.

This, despite its terrible title (a play, I think, on Foxe's Book of Martyrs) stretches for over 700 pages and something like thirteen years. Essentially, extreme Christian Luther Amos Dunphy becomes convinced that God wants him to murder the doctors who murder babies in the womb - abortionists, operating perfectly legally in state funded women's clinics. His victim is Gus Vorhees. In November 1999 Dunphy shoots him down, kills him, and calmly surrenders to the authorities. The only problem is, he also shoots and kills the volunteer who drove Vorhees to work, a Vietnam veteran.


Dunphy refuses to plead in court and will only accept the court-appointed public defender, despite the thousands of dollars raised by rightwing evangelicals. Nevertheless, a jury in his hometown of Muskagee Falls, Ohio, fails to convict. Dunphy remains in gaol until a second trial finds him guilty. This being Ohio, he receives a death sentence. No one expects him to be executed. The two families - that of assassin and victim - enter that uniquely American martyrdom of waiting for justice to take its course.


The families are very different in terms of class, education and beliefs. In other respects they are not so different. A mother left with a handful of young children. Neither mother is functioning. Edna Mae Dunphy is lost in religious delirium. Her older children, Lucas and Dawn, have to assume responsibility. Lucas ducks out as soon as he is old enough to leave school. Dawn does her best to do her duty but other kids in her new hometown - the wonderfully named Mad Junction - bully and attack her. Dawn is a big girl. She fights back and...


Meanwhile, Jenna Vorhees, a lawyer, effectively abandons her three children to go on a crusade defending women's right to choose. Her daughter Naomi begins putting together an archive of her father's life and death. Eventually that leads her to her grandmother and her uncle, both splendid New York elite eccentrics. It also leads, finally, to Dawn Dunphy, now a professional female boxer awaiting her title shot.


We have marvelled throughout at Oates's literary skill - the different prose styles she uses for the two families, the italicised quotes which we eventually realise are from Naomi's archive. But then, in the final quarter, Oates reveals her particular talent, which those not in the know would never expect of a New England grande dame professor of a certain age. The fact is, Joyce Carol Oates is one of the world's great boxing writers. In my opinion her only rival is Norman Mailer. And Mailer, so far as I know, never wrote anything as good as the last two chapters of An American Book of Martyrs. Frankly, it's essential reading.

Jack of Spades - Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a phenomenon. I remember reading one of her stories in 1973 and she's still turning out top-quality fiction today. Jack of Spades is from 2015 and is one of her clever, exciting modern horror stories. Stephen King and Dean Koontz would get 500 pages out of the same material but Oates opts for cool, compact precision below which lurk many dark and nuanced layers.


Andrew J Rush is a fifty-four year-old author. He is very successful but not quite in the league of King or Koontz or Peter Straub. Indeed he is known as 'the gentleman's Stephen King', a title he is happy to claim. Recently, though, he has developed a second literary string, publishing gory cult horror as 'Jack of Spades'. Rush fully gets the parallel with King - he even sends King copies of the Spade paperbacks. The King motif is one Oates plays with, like a cat with a spider. Much is made of the link with King's The Dark Half, which I haven't read, especially when 'Jack' starts a commentary in Andrew's head. But the real ploy is a brilliant inversion of Misery.


Andrew suddenly finds himself sued for plagiarism by a local madwoman, C W Haider. It turns out she has sued King and others on the same basis. She is old money, the last of her line, and lives in a crumbling Gothic mansion in the same New Jersey township as Rush. Part of her claim is that Rush has broken into her house and stolen her outlines and plots.


The case is thrown out, naturally. Haider collapses in some sort of fit and is temporarily hospitalised. So Rush, egged on by Jack, does what Haider claimed he had already done. He inveigles his way into her house, leaves as a present a book signed by 'Steven King' (not Stephen), and steals some of her valuable first edition books. He also finds her stash of manuscripts and sees that there really are very obvious similarities, and that Haider's work precedes his. The discovery sends him progressively off the rails. Jack of Spades is his secret alter ego, but smalltown celebrity Andrew also has other, deeper secrets that Oates cunningly holds back until the very end.


Jack of Spades is a short book - 224 pages, small format, big print - but it is completely realised. Not a word is wasted, not a line is superfluous. It's a gem.

Homer and Langley - E L Doctorow

Doctorow, the arch-manipulator of modern American history, produced this atypical short novel in 2009.  It is atypical in the sense that whereas in novels like Ragtime and Billy Bathgate he goes in for panoramic sweep of a particular era with multiple protagonists, Homer and Langley covers an immense period (roughly 1900 to 1970) and has only two significant characters, the eponymous Collyer brothers.  I didn't know when reading the novel that the Collyers were real and every bit as bizarrely behaved as Doctorow shows them to be - the ultimate compulsive hoarders who dressed in rags but who were immensely rich.  Doctorow swaps their identities and I think I can see why. In reality Homer was the elder brother who didn't go blind until middle age and Langley was the pianist.  But Langley was the one who died first and fell victim to his own hoarding, and Doctorow makes that more impactful on Homer because - in the story - he has been reliant on his 'older' brother for almost his entire life.  The novel is about withdrawal from normal society and therefore Doctorow chooses to make Homer deaf rather than paralyzed as he became in real life.  What I can't understand, and what I think undermines the book, is the decision to add thirty years to their lives.  The brothers actually died in 1947, and the opening up of their Fifth Avenue brownstone mansion was a press sensation.  Surely the interest was on account of how much the brothers had when the general population had gone without of recent years as their contribution to the war effort.  Also, I feel that Doctorow was much better at capturing the flavour of the first half of the Twentieth Century than he is at tackling the second.  He really doesn't get the hippies which seem to be the main reason for stretching the timescale - they rather conveniently take to the elderly brothers as fellow drop-outs, which is lame and predictable.  The end is also predictable but that matters less, because Doctorow handles it so well.  The idea of Jacqueline, for whom Homer is typing out his life story on a Braille typewriter scavenged by his brother, strikes me as pointless.

I know I'm being picky but it's only because Ragtime is one of my Desert Island books.  For all its flaws what we have in Homer and Langley is an autumnal display of Doctorow's huge literary skills, quirky imagination and skewed take on the society which bred him.  For most of his rivals, that would count as a major achievement.

For those who want to read Homer and Langley reviewed by one of Doctorow's most eminent peers, here is the link to Joyce Carol Oates in the New Yorker.

The Accursed - Joyce Carol Oates

I have been an admirer of Oates since the early Seventies but haven't read anywhere near enough of her prodigious output.  The Accursed (2013) is magnificent, a triumphant meld of literary skill and pure imagination.  In this instance the imagination is Gothic and very dark indeed. 

What we have is the world of the Princeton elite 1905-6 - professors, presidents, priests, and the socialist madman Upton Sinclair churning out utopian propaganda on the sidelines.  Woodrow Wilson is president of the university, whereas Grover Cleveland sits on the board and has twice been president of the US.  We are taken behind the veil of decency which cloaks these private/public lives.  Most thrilling of all, in many ways, is Poor Puss, the invalid Adelaide Burr who has never recovered from her wedding night and who confides the most outrageous things to her coded journal.  Even the historian who gives us the account is pivotal to the action in that his unexpected birth caused one of the many flowerings of the Princeton Curse.  There are subplots by the dozen, worlds within worlds, and a juicy cameo from Jack London and his 'lady' Charmian.

To say more might be to give the game away.  I simply cannot recommend this book highly enough.