Spins An Enjoyable Yarn

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16148382Spinning Out by David Stahler Jr.
My Rating: 4/5 Stars

If I were a high school stoner, who wandered the halls aimlessly, managed to somehow get high every five minutes, pulled every prank imaginable in a pertinent effort to stick it to the man, the principal, and the school board, I would have considered this the crème de la crème, as I laughed giddily for nearly an hour, and then had a serious case of the munchies. But I was a massive nerd in high school, who held a certain amount of respect for the man and authority, probably didn’t even truly comprehend the concept of acting out, actually wanted to excel in my classes because I understood that it would affect my future, and tried real hard not to stand out in a bad way, already grasping that I was a bit different than the majority of my classmates and that I didn’t need to further emphasize the point.

Either way, or even if you fall somewhere in between these two extremes, this novel spins an enjoyable yarn and provides lifelike characters with profuse problems better suited for linoleum floors and locker-lined walls. And it works, all of it. The struggle for an identity, the friend turned love interest, and the rebels trying to sing a different tune could have felt forced in less capable hands, instead these all felt real to me, and I was transported back to simpler times, minus the copious amounts of weed.

SPINNING OUT filled my head with a hazy fog and had me twirling in a multitude of directions, happily soaking up the pages the way a beach bum might soak up the sun’s rays. Despite this read lacking volume, instead becoming easily consumable like Pop-Tarts, it packed plenty of sentiment and brought to mind the phrase stoners with heart. Stewart and Frenchy may have out smoked Cheech & Chong, but these two knuckleheads decided on a plan to leave more of a legacy than a few roaches and a men’s bathroom filled with the lingering effects of the sweet-smelling smoke.

But every dynamic duo needs a Kaela. She was adorable, accomplished, admirable, available, articulate, attentive, adept, approachable, apt, addictive, awesome, and amazing. And if I were to describe this compelling novel, I could use many of the same terms. If you want a deep, thought-provoking, look-up-every-other-word-in-the-dictionary type of read, you may want to look elsewhere. But if you’re looking for amusement and the opportunity to get high for a few hours, and I mean that both literally and figuratively, you may just find yourself having a smokin’ good time.

Rebop And Daddy-O

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12835696Brown’s Requiem by James Ellroy
My Rating: 4/5 Stars

I love hard-boiled voices. Why? You might ask. Because I like seeing a dickhead get punched in the gullet and knocked on his keister. I take an absurdly sick pleasure in this scenario. Again, you might ask why. Well…because I have literally been an underdog my entire life. I might as well have a t-shirt with the mantra “Constantly Underestimated.” If it were a theme song, I’d sing the chorus, pound the drums, and lead the backup vocals. But I don’t mind. In fact, it’s great when the bar is set low enough that I can practically crawl over it, and I set my goals as high as a CEO, and somewhere in the middle, I come crashing through like a hurricane, to the point that I might as well have stunned my opponent with a Taser, stapled his head to the carpet, put a metal plate in his head, and fired up the microwave.

And that’s what a good hard-boiled novel does for me. I down a bottle of Jack, fire my Beretta at my flat screen, and then wait for the fuzz to show up at my door, so I can show those coppers a thing or two. And Fritz Brown certainly uses his .38 when the situation warrants it. The voice was hard enough that I might as well have been picking grit and grim out of my teeth with a chainsaw. I savored every minute of the journey. I was transported to a time where rebop and Daddy-O were common lingo, although both were used a bit too frequently for my liking. That’s the downside to slang: It doesn’t normally age well.

But that was a small price to pay for a story that had me digging my fingers into the sofa cushions and was filled with enough beautiful broads and dames to start a backup band. My personal favorites were Jane Baker and Kallie and Dori, all of whom packed more than enough feminine wiles to start a drunken riot with the right rowdy crowd. The men—Omar Gonzalez and Walter Curran and Richard Ralston—proved just as interesting and even more intimidating.

Every PI needs the right mode of transportation, and the Camaro served Fritz’s purposes well. Its heft and muscle popped off the pages and into my living room, the engine roaring louder than a mountain lion. Even brief interactions—Brothers Mark and Randy and Kevin and Bob and Sisters Julie and Carol—proved a nice respite from the heart of the action, and had me salivating at the fire pit, although the thought of gamey grilled dog nearly flipped my stomach.

If hard-boiled PIs and time warps are your forte, and you don’t mind early Ellroy where he’s still refining his craft, then you might find yourself enjoying the ride. Just make sure you hold on tight and occasionally squeeze your eyes shut.

I’d like to end with a monologue that has absolutely no relevance whatsoever to BROWN’S REQUIEM, that I stole off of Wikipedia, which they stole from The Evening Class. Other than being entirely entertaining, it serves no orthopedic function. James Ellroy often starts public appearances with a version of the following: “Good evening peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty-sniffers, punks and pimps. I’m James Ellroy, the demon dog, the foul owl with the death growl, the white knight of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. I’m the author of 16 books, masterpieces all; they precede all my future masterpieces. These books will leave you reamed, steamed and drycleaned [sic], tie-dyed, swept to the side, true-blued, tattooed and bah fongooed [sic]. These are books for the whole fuckin’ family, if the name of your family is Manson.”

Meet Charlie Hardie

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11828769Fun & Games by Duane Swierczynski
My Rating: 4/5 Stars

Meet Charlie Hardie, former cop, resident badass, coming to housesit in a neighborhood near you. He gets drunk and watches old movies as often as Congress runs a budget deficit, before he meets Lane Madden, a chick with more attitude and gumption and fighting ability than the top UFC contender, and gets tossed in the middle of the ring with a group of coldblooded killers. Lane’s tough, and she’s not about to take attitude from anyone, including a group of hit men and one woman who want nothing more than to see her dead.

If I had to pick a favorite character (and this is nothing short of a difficult task), I’d have to say Mann topped the charts. She focuses on the score, and she has a body and an attitude that just won’t quit. Despite being maimed and mauled (and her thing against guns), she’s going to see her assignment through all the way to end, as long as she still has a breath or two left in her. She focuses on her script, and she sets out to direct her masterpiece, even if she has to improvise her plan multiple times.

If FUN AND GAMES had been set anywhere other than LA, the high speed chases on narrow mountain passes, the tan, shaved woman sunbathing on her deck in the nude in broad daylight, the impalement of Charlie by a beautiful woman in a t-shirt and bikini underwear wielding a microphone stand like it’s a machete, and the house that goes up in flames faster than a hayfield after a lightning strike, the antics might have strained my believability factor, even though I have a high tolerance for suspending disbelief. But I figured this was LA and all bets are off, literally, and I thought absolutely nothing of the shenanigans, as I pushed the car close to ninety in the middle of the freeway, flipping page after high-octane page, and enjoying the ride with every smooth turn.

All The Way Cuckoo

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12837725Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
My Rating: 5/5 Stars

I think I might have met someone that is certifiably insane. Not just a little insane but all the way cuckoo. So crazy that I want to get out of her head right now, rinse myself off, and then down some sort of medication to ease the pain that is building up like a ball of wax.

And just when I thought I had everything figured out, I found myself traveling on a different elevator, headed to a different destination, and in the opposite direction. I realized I knew nothing. Possibly even less than nothing. It’s like a light switch was suddenly flipped on, and I discovered I was standing in a bedroom when I thought I was standing in the living room, and in my underwear, no less.

Without saying too much, I wouldn’t read this book if I planned on getting married. Ever. And since I’m already married, I might start sleeping with the nightlight on, even though I’ve never been a nightlight kind of guy. It’s that good. Literally.

Gillian Flynn has human psyche nailed to perfection: those dark places that no one ever wants to talk about or visit, those demons that are stuffed in a closet, duct taped from head to toe, and then tied to a chair. It freaked me out, because it felt so real, and was as real as any piece of fiction I’ve ever read.

If you like dark, psychological fiction, then you’ll want to snap this book up faster than a piece of Ghirardelli chocolate. Just make sure to leave the lights on while reading.

Unreliable Narrator

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10323019Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson
My Rating: 3/5 Stars

Christine proves rather reliable in her unreliability as a narrator. But it’s not exactly breaking character since she can’t remember shit. I’ve had traumatic experiences in my life, and I can’t remember that particular time period. My mind is blank. It’s like that particular event didn’t happen, except I remember the before and the after and there’s a crumpled car to prove to me that I’m not just making shit up in my head. And if your entire world revolves around your husband Ben and you suddenly see three words in your diary—DON’T TRUST BEN—I can understand how that might be terrifying and traumatic for you. I’d equate it to building a million dollar mansion on quicksand.

The structure worked for me. It added suspense. Had BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP been structured any other way, it would have crumbled in on itself like an origami bird. But I didn’t like the ending. It felt a bit like cheating to me. *BEGIN SPOILER* Christine suddenly has her memory back or large chunks of it at least, because the supposed traumatic event is over, and Mike has been expunged from existence. It seemed a tad convenient for me. S.J. Watson may, or may not, have consumed an illegal substance during this period, and there’s a decent chance he may have inhaled. *END SPOILER*

But otherwise the story worked. It had a different feel to it, and I was turned on enough to want to know what happened, but I did have a sinking suspicion I had the ending figured out before it arrived.

For those of you who don’t like tangents, you’ll probably want to skip right on over this part. Let’s get one thing straight: There are no original plotlines. The well of lost plots has been used up, drying faster than the Nevada desert. Sure, it’s easy enough to make the argument that this story is similar to Memento, but so what? We might as well take every romance and mystery off the shelves…and sit around and wait for someone to come up with something “original.” I’ll save you the suspense: You probably have a better chance of meeting a little green alien, having him tickle your forehead, and then receiving a wet smack to the lips. Guess what? The Fast & The Furious is essentially the same as Point Break, only there’re cars and car racing instead of surfing. And the director of The Fast & The Furious is in preproduction on a remake of Point Break. You’re welcome.

But let’s get to the good news: Even without an endless number of plots, there are an endless number of ideas and experiences and opportunities and characters that writers can bring to the table, bringing an essential “uniqueness” to the creative drawing board. The Fast & The Furious feels different from Point Break because the characters are different. End tangent.

More Mississippi Than Massachusetts

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17259190A Crack In Everything by Angela Gerst
My Rating: 1/5 Stars

Poisoned Pen Press let me down. I don’t blame the author, although I suppose I could. But the author and I didn’t have a history, an established relationship, a rapport if you will, and from my perspective it was going really well. Poisoned Pen Press published good novels, and I like to purchase and read good novels, so it was what amounted to a beautiful friendship.

I’d met a few of their authors, along with one of their founders and editor-in-chief Barbara Peters, and I’d even been fortunate enough to have two of their authors blurb my debut mystery novel, so if this were a batting cage, I’d be knocking every single ball out of the park. I ended up lost in worlds created by Jon Talton, Frederick Ramsay, Tammy Kaehler, Rachel Brady, and Dana Stabenow, clipping along at a nice, even pace, and then this disaster slammed me into a brick wall, the airbag deployed, and I ended up with a rather severe case of whiplash.

If I had to sum up how I felt while reading A CRACK IN EVERYTHING, I’d say it was similar to being audited by the IRS. Not that I’ve been audited before (and if any IRS employees are Goodreads members, I’d really appreciate your continued support in keeping me off of the naughty list).

So what caused this mother of all letdowns? Like any major car accident, it wasn’t a particular incident that pushed me over the edge, but several little instances that caused the ensuing explosion. The biggest offense (and I thought of my wife as I read this, since she lived in the Boston area by choice and New Mexico by accident) was that it didn’t feel like Boston. Sure, Angela Gerst name-dropped Waltham and Moody Street and Harvard Square and the North End and Charlestown and Newton and Brookline and Chestnut Hill Mall and Copley Place and I believe there might have even been a T reference, as well as other hotspots around the city, but it felt more Mississippi than Massachusetts. This isn’t Robert B. Parker’s Boston, that’s for darn sure. The novel lacked even a basic grit that’s normally present in the Boston area, and certainly nowhere near the caliber of Dennis Lehane, who really lets his love for the city shine through on every single page of his novels. This brings me to another point. Ms. Gerst is originally from New York, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s the mother of all sins to a Boston native. She would have been better off just flat-out lying about that part in her bio (and saying she was from Iraq or Iran), or just eliminating it altogether. This is a feud so hot and heavy that a David Ortiz jersey buried at the new Yankee Stadium made The New York Times.

Let me stop for a moment here. I realize Susan Callisto is from California and so she’s a transplant (as was I for over two years), but she should have adapted to her surroundings. I also realize the novel is written in first person, so she’s not going to use words like idear, or pahking the cah, lobstah, or chowdah. But the people who were natives of the city should have spoken in Boston accents more than one time in the whole novel. Just dropping a word here and there would have added an underlying realism that just didn’t seem to be there. Dunkin’ Donuts, the business of choice for many a Massachusetts resident, didn’t receive a single mention. With over 80 stores in the Boston city limits alone, it was the equivalent of discovering some sort of alternate universe. And maybe that’s what this novel attempted to do all along. If so, it has certainly succeeded. But if it really was supposed to be set in reality, I have included the link to The Wicked Good Guide to Boston English, along with a few choice words and phrases (stolen from aforementioned site), since Boston does indeed have its own language.

Av – an avenue with a long name, for example, Massachusetts Avenue becomes Mass-av; Commonwealth Avenue, Comm-av.

Bubbla – that’s a water fountain to you, bub.

Chowdahead – stupid person. The phrase has spread westa Wihsta, but it’s definitely of local origins.

Dunkie’s – the donut shop on the corner.

Frappe – a milkshake or malted elsewhere, it’s basically ice cream, milk and chocolate syrup blended together. The ‘e’ is silent.

Frickin’ – the F-word as an adjective in polite company. “Often paired with ‘wicked,’ creating the sublime poetry of ‘The Ozzy cawncert wuz frickin’ wicked!'”

Jimmies – those little chocolate thingees you ask the guy at the ice-cream store to put on top of your cone.

The Pike – the Massachusetts Turnpike. Also, the world’s longest parking lot, at least out by Sturbridge on the day before Thanksgiving.

Rotary – a traffic circle. One of Massachusetts’ two main contributions to the art of traffic regulation (the other being the red-and-yellow pedestrian-crossing light).

Wicked – a general intensifier: “He’s wicked nuts!”

Here’s a link to the full site: The Wicked Good Guide To Boston English

Update – If you need a good laugh, you should check out the love that this same review has received on Amazon. To view the affection, click here. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I still stand behind my original review, possibly even a bit taller than I did before. And I will say I’m a bit disappointed if this is the best they’ve got.

High School Voice

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8606706The Perks Of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
My Rating: 5/5 Stars

If my high school voice ever appeared in novel form, there’s a good chance it’d resemble Charlie. He’s naïve and precocious and childish and odd and enlightening and invisible and seen and I could have tried pot brownies and would have had no idea I was stoned unless someone told me and I would have wanted a milkshake and I can’t dance but I can do the sway and I could have witnessed a rape and had no idea what had happened because I was in middle school a kid. I could have confided to my teacher about a tragic event that happened at home and I avoided beer like it was the second coming of Satan and I could have written letters to an anonymous pen pal and I did chores to earn my allowance and I wrote poems in high school college and I went out with a girl who had what could be described as low self-esteem and I was totally infatuated with her for a period of time and I like unconventionally beautiful women. I love music and books and I overanalyze and outthink myself on a fairly regular basis and speculate and contemplate and can probably be considered a deep thinker in a world that doesn’t seem to plan or speculate or think too deeply and I can keep secrets and my mom tells me she loves my stories and I type on a typewriter computer and I hate goodbyes and I had a teacher that thought I was special, albeit it was the third grade and sometimes I feel so much that my body has to physically shut itself down otherwise I’d start frying brain cells. I think too fast.

But I didn’t smoke copious amounts of weed and cigarettes or eat pot brownies or trip on LSD and *BEGIN SPOILER* I wasn’t sexually molested and I didn’t spend time with a psychiatrist or spend two months in a hospital because I had a mental breakdown *END SPOILER*.

But I did love THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER with my whole being and I don’t feel as though it will cause me any mental breaks to feel this much and to be totally caught up in Charlie’s world and to feel fortunate for Charlie because he has friends like Patrick and Sam and Mary Elizabeth and that he was able to mail letters to his anonymous friend to help him through his first year of high school and that he was able to go to parties where he kissed girls and spent time at the Big Boy and *BEGIN SPOILER* he was able to stand on the back of the pickup truck with Patrick blaring the music as he went through the tunnel with the city and all of its lights peeking out on the other side *END SPOILER*.

Happy Pills

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15831621Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
My Rating: 4/5 Stars

Bernadette Fox might just be the craziest person I have never met. If she consumed enough “happy” pills to actually become a fully-functioning member of society, she’d end up comatose from an overdose and spend the next six years of her life breathing through a respirator. Calling her eccentric gives Randy Quaid, Charlie Sheen, and Courtney Love a bad name. Or to put it another way, Bernadette Fox makes Adrian Monk look like Tom Brady.

Audrey Griffin needs to be treated with electric shock therapy until she ejaculates her back teeth. And her son Kyle (he’s 15), at the age of 21, will be in prison for the rest of his natural life or his body parts will be tossed into storm gutters and unmarked graves. Oh, and Mrs. Griffin probably should experience a form of hell. In her case, she should be forced to sit in front of a TV with headphones on and have her highlight reel played for her on repeat until her ears and eyes bleed.

Holy fuckballs! This may be the most insane novel I’ve ever read. It’s hard for me to ascertain its exact level of brilliance because I feel like I need to be in a straitjacket, hooked up to an electric chair, while wearing a metal helmet and a metal diaper.

Composed entirely of emails, report cards, receipts, random musings, rants, raves, Bee’s voice, Bernadette’s history, and the preparations for a family trip to Antarctica that are being conducted by an Indian named Manjula Kapoor via the Internet, the first several parts had me entertained and enthralled and nearly hypnotized with delusions of madness and mayhem. There’s a dog named Ice Cream, a friend named Kennedy, a husband named Elgie, the astute services of Delhi Virtual Assistants International, a giant mud sliding billboard, traumatized kindergartners (with possible PTSD), psychotic breaks, selfish and self-pitying delusions of grandeur, and the former home of the Straight Gate School for Girls (the Fox/Branch residence) that probably should have been condemned sometime in the past decade.

Like the rest of WHERE’D YOU GO, BERNADETTE, the ending proved zany and whacky and maybe a bit farfetched. But I didn’t like it. In fact, I hated it with a passion, and wanted to beat it with a baseball bat, and then wait till it stood up, and then proceed to whack it again. *BEGIN SPOILER* You fled to Antarctica and then the only communication with your fifteen year-old daughter is a letter that she never received, and then to dump the entire contents of your life onto her via a large unmarked envelope. And then to place sole blame for all of your marital problems on your husband, while you sleepwalked through an entire marriage. Seriously? *END SPOILER*

So if you like Seinfeld and Arrested Development (and if you don’t, I feel sorry for your loss, and you probably deserve a hug), then you might just find yourself enjoying this novel.

Straitjacketed Humor

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16071701Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen
My Rating: 3/5 Stars

If I ever visit Key West, I’ll smuggle aboard enough food rations to last me twice as long as my planned stay, refrain from eating at any restaurant within a sixty-mile radius, catch my own fish from my hotel balcony, and cook them from my own grill on said balcony, setting off all smoke detectors in a three-room radius. To that end, I’ll probably increase my life expectancy by six years, and I won’t go to sleep with cockroach-filled nightmares.

If writing zany characters were an occupation unto itself, Carl Hiaasen would have fit the requirements long ago and placed himself firmly within its trenches. This go round we are treated to a hairless capuchin monkey that was fired from Pirates Of The Caribbean and who developed an unhealthy attachment to Johnny Depp, hurls his own feces, and is addicted to Dunhill tobacco. He also subsists on conch fritters and other fried foods, most of which have his cholesterol levels shooting through the roof and have aided in his current hairless ailment; a daughter who sees dollar signs and would sell her soul to the devil himself for a million dollars instead of grieving over her deceased pa; a child sex offender named Plover Chase who exchanged grades in AP English for bedroom antics of a more than questionable nature; a Dragon Queen who likes to fornicate on a Rollie scooter; an assistant medical examiner who likes to have sex on her operating table amid sixty or so stiffs and in the middle of a hurricane; one sodomized surgeon; and a restaurant inspector who counts cockroaches with a homemade roach-vacuuming concoction.

There’s enough satire and madness and mayhem to satisfy the attention span of a gnat with a Medicare scam large enough to interest the FBI, one spec house up in flames faster than a blowtorch applied to rice paper, questionable corpses, scorned ex-lovers, dubious alliances, and the ever lingering environmental issues found in many of his tales…You know, your typical Carl Hiaasen novel.

While I can only speculate on his writing methods, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn he sits at his desk chair in a straitjacket pecking at his keyboard with the tip of his nose or dictating his stories into a voice recorder to be later typed by his secretary. And he does it all with a large grin and swag smile, inching up the chaos with each turn of the page. Because that’s exactly what happens here.

While BAD MONKEY certainly held my attention and had more than its share of laugh out loud moments, I couldn’t help but compare this novel to his earlier work, and I felt like he came up a little short. But on the bright side, there’s more than enough fuckwads and shitweasels to occupy an entire wing at an insane asylum. And in the end, that was enough for me to like this tale.

Light And Airy And Breezy

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16130264The First Affair by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus
My Rating: 2/5 Stars

If you haven’t met an Erica McAlister in your life, then you should consider yourself a lucky bastard. You can whistle a lovely tune, as you march down to The White House, roll around on the eagle’s wings in the Oval Office, and then high-five the Secret Service—the guys with the earpieces and dark sunglasses—before your hands are slapped in cuffs, and you spend the next several years of your life contemplating your own stupidity in a maximum security prison somewhere in the middle of Kansas. This friend Erica has enough problems to cause a psychiatrist to start pounding whiskey faster than he can fill the glasses in the middle of her agreed upon appointment time. She’s a princess, a queen, and the entire court rolled into one; she’s the main attraction; she’s been coddled and worshipped since she was in diapers; this is her universe and everyone else merely gets to play in the sandbox; and she tells you her issues just so you can tell her how great she is and maximizing her sympathy points like stock tips.

But by the end of THE FIRST AFFAIR, she’d somewhat redeemed herself. Not to the point that she and I could have coffee together, but to the point that I didn’t need to wipe her existence from my brain via a metal probe and possibly a soldiering iron.

Jamie McAlister, her younger sister, isn’t without her own issues. Being completely starved for attention, to the point that she would have adopted a pet tarantula if he would just give her a hug, she devoted her time and resources to a completely unattainable man, simply because he had given her a look and possibly melted her thong in the process. She’s a starfucker of epic proportions. The President of the United States (POTUS) may have made googly eyes at her, but she began to view her life as some sort of fairy tale, where she was Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel, all rolled into one big happy family. If naiveté were a full-contact sport, she’d have the shoulder pads and uniform and helmet, and she’d be poised for the ensuing kickoff. But, instead, of rooting for her, I felt sorry for her, and the massive number of ensuing missteps that somehow completely enclosed her life. Instead of being a likeable character, she had turned into the princess.

Brooke, Betsy, James, Greg, Lena, Peter, Paul, and Rachelle all lost my sympathy at some point during the novel, or never had it at all, and I sat back and waited for the hammer to drop on their lives. When it did, I took some sort of sick pleasure in their ensuing half-existence.

None of this is to say this is a bad novel. It was light and airy and breezy like a bag of popcorn, and it filled me up about as well as cotton candy.

I received this book for free through NetGalley.