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.