Road Dogs: a Genre Reader exclusive review

Elmore Leonard is no stranger to crime fiction. Road Dogs is his latest release, and it features Leonard's trademarked quirky ensemble of characters and heavy dialogue. One of his infamous Rules of Writing is to leave out the parts that most people skip, and that rule is in full effect here.

This novel features the welcome return of no less than three memorable characters from previous books, though knowledge of those books is not necessary to the enjoyment of this one.

The action begins with Jack Foley (from Out of Sight) being driven back to Florida to reconvene his 30-year prison sentence for bank robbery. In the van, he makes the acquaintance of crooked Cuban Cundo Rey (from LaBrava). The two soon become friends--road dogs, in the prison parlance, a term that connotes loyalty unto death--and Rey hooks Foley up with a new lawyer, a professional sentence cutter by the name of Megan Norris. Rey shills out plenty of cash to help Foley get out of prison early, to have kidnapping and escape attempt charges dropped, and then to set Foley up with a place to stay in sunny California once he is a free man. Foley ends up released weeks before Rey, and despite the Cuban's assurances that Foley doesn't owe him a thing, the bank robber suspects that Rey will come calling on the check at some point.

Still, a free house valued at millions of dollars is nothing to give a pass to, and it is in California that Foley meets Rey's girl Dawn Navarro (from Riding the Rap). Dawn is a psychic, and has supposedly been faithful to Rey (despite his long stretch in prison), but when Foley meets her, he soon discovers that she's been less than honest about her fidelity (she's got needs. Lots and lots of needs), less than honest about her motivations for being with Cundo Rey (she's so into his money), and less than honest about her uses of her supposed psychic abilities (she runs ghost busting scams on the local rich types, and hopes to get Foley involved). As Rey's release looms, Foley finds himself caught between a pretty good sounding scam with Dawn, a blossoming romance with a local "haunted" actress, and loyalty to Rey. Add to these main conflicts a slew of secondary characters, including several gangbangers and an overzealous FBI agent who is monitoring Foley 24/7 for one more bank job, and you have what might have been a complex mess of a novel. With so many characters to keep track of and so many plot & subplot threads going on, it takes a deft hand to keep everything straight. However, Leonard has been writing long enough to produce a quick, seemingly effortless read from this complexity. There is plenty going on, though the plot is less about crime than it is about characters. These are all characters with wants and with the impulses to go some very nasty places to obtain their desires.

Much of the action is delivered through the dialogue, and Leonard has a great ear for the nuances of his character speech patterns. This book (like many of Leonard's works) seems to be written with specific actors in mind (particularly George Clooney, who played the Foley character in Stephen Soderbergh's adaptation of Out of Sight), and while this gimmick might have resulted in caricatures, Road Dogs still feels fresh. There is quite a bit of humor, healthy doses of suspense, some thoughtful exchanges, and more basketball than I've seen in a novel since John Updike's Rabbit, Run.

An unusual choice, this time around, finds a supernatural presence in the book. Leonard never fully addresses this as being real or some long con--is Dawn Navarro actually psychic or simply a good reader of people, is actress Danialle Karmanos actually haunted?--and like much of the book it has the feel of being both at the same time. How the reader absorbs this element depends upon their own taste, but a case can certainly be made that this presence or absence of the Unknowable speaks as a metaphor for the whole of the book. Is there something outside of these characters acting upon them, or do they do what they do because of independent choice? A fascinating question by which to read the book in very different ways. (Is my English degree showing? Sorry about that.)

Road Dogs turned out to be rather different than what I was expecting. Truth be told, I was waiting for the book to veer into a One Last Bank Job shtick, but Elmore Leonard deftly avoids that cliché to focus on a group of characters doing what they do to get by in sunny California. Sometimes surprises of this nature can prove disappointing, but in this case I was pleasantly surprised, entertained, and given a few things to think about. I don't ask for much more from my leisure-time reading, and often don't even get this much.

Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard
262 pages
William Morrow
Published 2009
Mass Market Paperback due out 2010

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Murder of Crows: a Genre Reader Exclusive Review

This slender volume is a third party adventure module for Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu role playing game. It is a single adventure, good for a couple of evenings of play, and it is set in the horrific world of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.

Reviewing a role playing game module in the context of Genre Reader is a tricky thing. These sorts of books serve two major purposes: first, they tell a story, but they do so in a different way than typical fiction does. In some ways, they act like a screenplay in that adventure modules are designed to primarily act like a blueprint, a springboard for other people to play a game set in this particular tale/world/whatever. Sometimes this duality of purpose results in a poorly realized, somewhat boring read: a string of tangentially related encounters for players to hack and bash their way through in the search (to paraphrase Mel Brooks from Spaceballs) for more loot. Not every role playing game book is written the same, however. There are plenty of books that both tell an intriguing tale and lend themselves to allowing gaming groups to expand on the material and ultimately to twist it to their purposes.

The granddaddy of delightful RPG reads is not Dungeons and Dragons. It is Call of Cthulhu. Based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft (and others), the books are lighter on the mechanics of gaming (aka crunch) and very heavy on atmosphere and good old storytelling. There are some gaming supplements that I enjoy reading for the pleasure of reading, and Call of Cthulhu books are those.

Though it is the first offering in the Cthulhu universe from a relatively new company (Super Genius Games), Murder of Crows is no exception to the trend of story driven adventure modules.

In CoC, players take on the roles of normal folks thrust into the dangerous and sanity shattering world of the Cthulhu Mythos. Murder of Crows poses an intriguing mystery story set in the town of Bethlehem, New Hampshire during the Roaring 1920s. The town itself has recently been beset by thousands of crows. The birds choke the town's rooftops, trees, and telephone lines, watching the town. While this is eerie enough, the birds have also been attacking anyone who dares to venture into the woods outside of town. This has caused a major crimp in the local tourist season (always an important aspect of New England's culture and economy). It is up to the player characters to get to the bottom of the mystery.

The book itself is divided into three "Acts," though this is a pretty awful term for the three sections. For me, "Acts" suggests elements of a continuous narrative. However, here the three individual components are quite different. Act 1 details the town of Bethlehem itself, the personalities therein, and provides plenty of clues and red herrings should the players seek to interview the local populace. This is a charming section with some nicely sketched personalities. Act 2 details the series of escalating supernatural events that plague the investigation into the mystery. It is a relatively short chapter and the contents are meant to be incorporated into the activities of Act 1 (see what I mean?). The final Act is the closest we have to a traditional Act structure, as it details the final confrontation between the players' characters and the menace of the story.

Which is not the ancient, tentacle bedecked horror I was expecting to find. The menace behind this story is actually quite human, though it plays quite nicely into the themes and motifs found in Lovecraft's fiction. Imagine that!

Included in this book are some handouts, an appendix for continuing game play in Bethlehem, NH (which does take a paragraph or two to sell readers on the next module from Super Genius), and a quartet of premade characters for players too lazy or eager to start play to make their own.

While Murder of Crows strikes me as a surprise filled and well balanced module for game play, it also fell into the curious place of being something that was simply fun to read for its own sake. Not necessarily the book to sell general readers on starting the habit of picking up role playing books instead of the latest mass market paperback, this is nevertheless a welcome addition to my shelf of gaming reads. I look forward to more Cthulhu adventures from SGG.

Murder of Crows by Stan! (Cover Art by Luis Guaragna)
32 pages
Super Genius Games
Published 2008

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Reprinted Review: The Woods are Dark by Richard Laymon

This review was originally posted at www.HorrorReader.com.

When it was originally published in 1981, Richard Laymon's second novel was heavily altered from the author's original conception. In his memoir of the craft, A Writer's Life, the author commented that the novel would never be recoverable, due to the many rewrites and general publishing skullduggery performed during that novel's release. Several years after his death, Richard Laymon's daughter Kelly has managed to perform a surgical feat: recovering the lost manuscript from no less than three different stacks of loose pages. Now, readers can see Richard Laymon's novel as originally intended.

When two groups of strangers arrive in Barlow, a small, forested town, they expect simple rest and food, a stop off on a journey to somewhere, anywhere else. They do not anticipate being taken captive by some crazy folks and brought deep into the surrounding woods, chained to a tree and left for a mysterious race of savages, called Krulls. What follows is a single night and day of pursuit and horror, with fates such as murder, rape and unspeakable depravity awaiting them...

The Woods Are Dark is a curious presentation of some absolutely disgusting material, and amply demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses found in just about all of Richard Laymon's work. Plot is king here, and this plot moves along with the expected bullet speed found in Laymon's better works. A close second to plot is imagery. The novel begins with a strange and engaging image, a pair of lovely young ladies speeding along the roads are forced to a stop when they encounter a curious shape crawling across the road, who then throws a grisly offering to them.
The language is like the plot: clear of distractions, and very straight ahead, tackling only what is needed and then moving on. Scenes are described with a kind of minimalist technique, and yet there is a quality of the vivid to the situations. What details are given are carefully chosen, leaving plenty of room for the imagination to fill in the blanks.

Too bad some of the more cruel moments are not handled with the same selectivity. Nope, the sexual and bodily assaults are all presented right in the middle of the mind's eye camera, little left to the imagination. The horror in this book is not of the supernatural variety, but of the awful things that human beings do to one another. For purposes of survival, sometimes. However, the most gut wrenching are those deeds performs out of a curious sort of joy. Oftentimes, these deeds are performed by characters that were originally presented as "sympathetic".

Really, there are very few sympathetic characters in the book. Many of them are vacuous shills, bodies whose only purpose is to be carved up or to do the carving (on a couple of special occasions, some do both). The men are a bit better drawn than the women (who often read like men with ample bosoms, alas), and as might be expected, the narrative finds nothing attractive about its females save for the size of their breasts. While this reader finds beauty and delight in the plentiful other curves of the human form, those do not have a place in this book.

Some of the horror is intended to be found in the disintegration of the civilized, as one of the protagonists finds a killer (and worse) lurking inside himself. However, this character's descent into the barbarous realm feels so fast as to be unbelieveable.. Then again, much of what happens is a little bit fast... The novel itself is about 210 pages, all told (with 5 pages of introduction about the new edition, and a lengthy preview of the next Laymon novel due out from Leisure), so there is little real room for such niceties as character development. Instead, characters seem to almost transform from one mindset to another, with very little rational reason.

Can an educated, civilized man (who considers himself a pacifist) spontaneously transform into a murderous monster, who not only takes delight in schatenfreud, but excels at killing other human beings? Why yes. Psychologically speaking, even the most stable personality type can become unhinged, particularly in such trying circumstances as are presented in this book. However, this reader would expect such a development to come about over the course of more than one day, not (possibly) two hours. This reader, this reviewer does not buy it.

The Woods Are Dark is a gruesome story, much in the flavor of the sort of "Don't Go In The Woods" slasher-type horror films that are once again en vogue in horror cinema. It's long about time that director Tobe (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) Hooper directed one of Richard Laymon's novels, they seem to stem from the same horror aesthetic and share plenty of themes and motifs. This novel in particular would make the basis of a fine Tobe Hooper picture. As a novel, however, it feels a bit light.

The Woods Are Dark by Richard Laymon
By the Mass Market Paperback
215 pages
July 2008
Leisure Books

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240 pages
August 2008
Cemetery Dance Publications

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Reprinted Review: Coffin County by Gary A. Braunbeck

This review was first posted at the now defunct www.HorrorReader.com.

Gary A. Braunbeck’s latest novel -- fourth in his Cedar Hill cycle from Leisure Books -- takes to task a rather challenging subject (no surprise from this author, who has made a career from fiction that asks difficult questions). The epigraph page reveals its themes, recounting passages on love, madness, God and insight from such authors as Heinrich Hein, Christopher Conlon, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Kahlil Gibran, and then concludes with a quartet of names, locations that have found homes in the social consciousness because they have all been sites of mass murder shootings. In Coffin County, Braunbeck’s fictional Cedar Hill will become another of these names.

Regular readers of Braunbeck’s fiction know that this author’s work is not content to merely recount horrors. There is a very human quality behind all the horrible happenings, and there is no lack of this human factor in the equation to follow. The supernatural does involve itself, but the real key elements are neither Powers-Man-Was-Not-Meant-To-Know nor Horrors-Without-Meaning, but a more existential issue: Why do Americans have such an easy time killing each other and why do we perform this deed so very often?

Regular readers of Horror Reader’s reviews will note that I’m approaching this book from a completely different direction than my typical review. Well, that’s because this reader found this book deeply unsettling. In both aesthetically pleasing (that whole Kafkaesque “one should read only books that bite and sting”) and philosophically challenging ways. While the concept of mass shootings alone is rather horrifying, the story takes several steps deeper into the realm of the disturbing by nearly sidelining the tragedy and suggesting both that the victimized men, women, and children had to die and that the monsters responsible for these deeds are not monsters at all...
What is the book’s story?

Well, we begin with a series of disjointed pieces. Following a single sentence Chapter One, readers will discover scenes from the night that Cedar Hill’s Old Towne East section adopted its current moniker of Coffin County (a historical flashback, which builds to a somewhat surreal and literally explosive, supernatural intersession of chaos), key passages from the fictional travelogue A Visitor’s Guide to Cedar Hill (including unpublished draft pages kept in CH’s Historical Society), a return to and expansion of the first chapter’s sentence, and even a momentary flash from the “present”... The effect is a relentless outpouring of imagery and stories, much of which has already occurred, some of which is about to happen, and all of which have ramifications that are yet to be understood. In the span of 77 pages, readers will discover quite a bit of disparate material touching upon events separated by about two hundred years. However, as Chaos Theory (a mathematical modeling system integral to this book, which non-science savvy readers may recall from Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park) tells us, what initially appears to be wildly disconnected information might actually be part of a very complex order. This order comes through when the story then seamlessly leaps to the present day to follow a procedural horror tale wherein the Cedar Hill police department must cope with several seemingly random acts of mass violence.

Gary A. Braunbeck’s writing is as controlled as ever, at turns evocative and beautiful and gruesome. Though this novel takes violence as its raison d’etre, it does not dwell so much in the commission of the acts as it does in the aftermath of those acts. Here, we find an eye that is unwilling to look away, a compassionate voice that delivers descriptions that are discomforting but never gratuitous.
Much as in the beginning, several viewpoints lead us through the story to come. Some of these are Cedar Hill citizenry, some are momentary glimpses into the minds of the supernatural forces at play, but the focal character for the story is Detective Ben Littlejohn, a man who understands loss (his wife was a victim of a robbery turned deadly) and yet does what he must to serve and protect Cedar Hill’s residents. While Ben is our protagonist character, however, the story is not actually told from his point of view.

The choice of voice for this work is interesting. In a technique seen in such works as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Coffin County offers us a fictional character narrating other fictional characters. In itself, this is nothing spectacularly new. However, this time around we neither find the removed narrator (ala Tom in The Great Gatsby) or the impassioned participant (ala the hard as nails protagonist of many a hardboiled fiction). Instead, “The Reverend” (a familiar face from several Cedar Hill stories) is more of a participating specter, a figure that flits through the characters, offering up deep views of plentiful headspaces. As much as we learn about the well drawn, three dimensional characters in this book, we also (inadvertently) learn about the narrator. While little concrete information is actually blatantly told, much is revealed through inference and a careful attention to both what is said as well as what is not. If this sounds like some cryptic puzzle, rest assured it is nothing of the sort.

This narrative trickery provides a rationale for some of the quirks in the text. At first, this reader was put off by the vast number of characters who seemed well acquainted with the depths of their own misery (Don’t any of these people repress? Is no one happy in Cedar Hill?), but this reader has since come to terms with the fact that many of these people have been unaware of their own sorrows. At least until they became participants in this book and therefore directly under the eye of this narrator.

While the book works on a purely surface level as a disturbing tale of terror, this reviewer found plenty happening beneath this successful, surface layer. Not only are allusions to other CH stories present and aplenty (though not so thick as to either distract or render the text indecipherable without a Cedar Hill concordance), but readers interested in the craft of writing will find much to savor here.

And yet...

Coffin County bothers this reader. A part of this is due to religious overtones that just don’t work for me, and a part is due to the vast amount of unbroken misery on display, and a part is due to the climax dancing uncomfortably close to one of The Worst Tricks In Storytelling (the dreaded: "...and then he woke up"), but ultimately it is the core ideological summation of the book (this reviewer nearly wrote “the core message” of the book, though that would incorrectly make this work seem little better than a platform for propagandizing). This book considers its material and formulates answers I strongly disagree with.

Great fiction does not settle with satisfactory, pat solutions. It gets the mind going, and Coffin County certainly got this reader’s mind a spinning. I don’t expect a book to necessarily agree with my (admittedly cracked) worldview, but the ones that present a rational argument in direct opposition... Bother me. Because I cannot debate with a book (short of writing a book of my own), I do not enjoy going on message boards, and I would rather not distract an author with a rambling, incoherent email (I’d rather read that author’s next book). Instead, this reader is forced to carry around the debate in heart and head, and that just bugs me.
Can I recommend this work? Hesitantly, yes.

I can certainly recommend the author. Braunbeck consistently writes some of today’s most powerful popular fiction. This work is his most effective. I cannot say if I quite like it, however. It’s got quite a few teeth, and I respect it. Respect, however, does not connote like. Any new Braunbeck novel is a cause for celebration, but Coffin County (more than anything else he has yet written) has the distinction of completely altering my outlook on what horror fiction can accomplish. I find myself unable to read the genre in quite the way I did before cracking this paperback’s spine.

The fifth (and final?) book for the author’s Cedar Hill cycle will be released by Leisure Books in 2009.

Coffin County by Gary A. Braunbeck
333 pages
Released June 2008
Leisure Books
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Mission Statement

For the longest time, I was editor-in-chief of www.HorrorReader.com. Well, it seemed like I was the only one posting there. And my posts got to be a little sporadic at the end, as my interests changed. I stopped reading solely horror (anyone can get burned out on the monotony of a single genre after long enough). Enter: Genre Reader.

Here I will try to offer semiregular new reviews of fiction that I'm reading. In addition, I will be reposting some of my Horror Reader reviews, if only to create a catalog of What Has Come Before.

Thanks for joining me on this little experiment in reading, reviewing, and criticism.

-- Daniel R. Robichaud
Reader At Large