THE VIOLIN CONSPIRACY, novel of greed, racism, and triumph

THE VIOLIN CONSPIRACY
BRENDAN SLOCUMB
Anchor Books
$28.00 hardcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

One of NPR's Best Books of 2022!

The Publisher Says: A riveting tale about a Black classical musician whose family heirloom violin is stolen on the eve of the most prestigious classical music competition in the world.

Ray McMillian loves playing the violin more than anything, and nothing will stop him from pursuing his dream of becoming a professional musician. Not his mother, who thinks he should get a real job, not the fact that he can't afford a high-caliber violin, not the racism inherent in the classical music world. And when he makes the startling discovery that his great-grandfather's fiddle is actually a priceless Stradivarius, his star begins to rise.

Then with the International Tchaikovsky Competition—the Olympics of classical music—fast approaching, his prized family heirloom is stolen. Ray is determined to get it back. But now his family and the descendants of the man who once enslaved Ray's great-grandfather are each claiming that the violin belongs to them.

With the odds stacked against him and the pressure mounting, will Ray ever see his beloved violin again?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Want to know what people really think of you? Stand between them and a big, fat payday. You will get your actual, genuine position in their hierarchy delivered at express speed and before the varnish could be applied, still less dried.

Rayquan (usually "Ray") McMillian learns that there's nothing in this world like the benjamins to bring stuff into focus very early: He grows up without anything extra and the minimum was as cheap as it could reasonably be (often enough cheaper). As soon as it became possible, Ray was pressured to stop wasting time with his stupid fiddling and get a shelf-stockin' job to "help the family" (aka his selfish mother). Time to make horrible noises on his fiddle was more than merely grudged, it was a source of actual anger...seen as selfish, unproductive, the action of a loser. (All those fingers pointin' back from the accusatory poking one missed her notice, it seems.)

You knew there'd be a grandmother in here, right? One who Believes in Ray? You were right, there is.

And a more wonderful soul it's hard to conjure. I was all ready to Pearl-Rule this bad boy before Grandma Nora (she whose belief in Ray makes her "talk so sweet {about him} it could give you diabetes") came on stage, I was so pissed off at the Philistines and money-grubbers Ray has to call family! What malign genetic flub gave Grandma Nora a daughter like Ray's mom?! And there's no end to the nasty, of course, since this is a thriller/mystery. But that's the tour I signed up to take, and was ready for. A bracing dose of lovingkindness later, it was all gas no brakes and that finish line won't know what hit it.

Ray, as you'll have gathered, is a fine musician and to hell with his grasping, whiny mother complaining about the "racket" his practicing makes. He perseveres, Grandma Nora's staunchness in his corner, and actually begins to climb the ladder of classical violin's performance hierarchy. What he faces along the way is no surprise to anyone reasonably sentient, as his ethnicity is used by everyone around him. Only rarely to help him, I'm sure you'll be stunned to learn. His other shining light is his teacher, his one professional mentor, Dr, Janice Stevens. She makes school a haven, a place where someone really gets him and sees the music in his being.

Ray's early training in Keep Calm and Carry On within the loving bosom of his family pays off. That ability to focus is his superpower. It leads him to the *pinnacle* of a violin soloist's ambitions: the International Tchaikovsky Competition, a quadrennial classical-music Olympics that unquestionably makes a musician's career. Even competing there is a leg up...and for a Black man raised with nothing, it is damned near unprecedented for him to be there.

That? That's enough novel for most of us. But Author Slocumb said, "...now, what happens if the Black man happens to get a Stradivarius from his grandmother...?"

What happens is betrayal, heartbreak, and the kind of publicity you damn sure can't pay for. Broken hearts mend; wounds don't fester forever; a career launched into the stratosphere by a juicy scandal leads to a lifetime of opportunities. Ones Ray's absolutely up to taking full advantage of, coming away with a silver medal in spite of the horrors around his violin's rape from him. This one unique possession, it will surprise no one to learn, opens so many doors to him. It will not surprise anyone, either, that he walks boldly up to the doors expecting them to open...and they do.

Ray's search for the thief of his prized possession, his almost desperate desire not to believe where the search leads him, and his dogged perseverance through it all speak volumes for the value of adversity surmounted in creating character. I think Author Slocumb did exactly the right thing by enabling Ray to reach back, to offer a hand of fellowship from his place of privilege.

Ray made it a point to highlight music by Black and Latinx composers. After all those years fighting and proving wrong the preconceptions that people who looked like him couldn't play the music of dead white men, he dove into the phenomenal music written by those people who did indeed look like him.

It is the thing that defines my memory of Ray McMillian, fictional character: He worked his ass off, he focused on the problem at hand, and he stomped the daylights out of the inner voices installed early that demanded he think about unimportant stuff instead of powering himself, supercharging his gifts with well-honed talents.

In the end, what matters in a life? Looking back, what difference does any of what we do make?

"Music's the gift. Caring's the gift. There are a lot of ways apart from a concert hall to make a difference in someone's life."

That's Dr. Janice Stevens, if you're wondering, having a ghostly chat with post-disaster Ray. Thanks, Janice. Whatever your name, wherever you might be...whichever one of us you reached out for, gave a hand to...Thanks to the Janices the world over who do something easy for them and priceless to the recipient.

Care.

UNDER COLOR OF LAW, first-in-series LA-set The One Good(-Enough) Cop story

UNDER COLOR OF LAW
AARON PHILIP CLARK (Trevor Finnegan #1)
Thomas & Mercer (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle original, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The murder of a police recruit pins a Black LAPD detective in a deadly web where race, corruption, violence, and cover-ups intersect in this relevant, razor-sharp novel of suspense.

Black rookie cop Trevor “Finn” Finnegan aspires to become a top-ranking officer in the Los Angeles Police Department and fix a broken department. A fast-track promotion to detective in the coveted Robbery-Homicide Division puts him closer to achieving his goal.

Four years later, calls for police accountability rule the headlines. The city is teeming with protests for racial justice. When the body of a murdered Black academy recruit is found in the Angeles National Forest, Finn is tasked to investigate.

As pressure mounts to solve the crime and avoid a PR nightmare, Finn scours the underbelly of a volatile city where power, violence, and race intersect. But it’s Finn’s past experience as a beat cop that may hold the key to solving the recruit’s murder. The price? The end of Finn’s career…or his life.

I RECEIVED THIS AS PART OF THE FIRST READS SELECTIONS THROUGH AMAZON PRIME.

My Review: I was in a weird position in September 2021. I got my monthly free-because-you-have-Prime offerings from Amazon and, where I usually have no problem picking between two or three of the stories, I was *stuck* between two I really, really wanted to read...the situation was so bad and the deadline to make my choice was looming so I asked my bookish friends to choose between them for me.

A dark and twisty psychological thriller set in Nebraska lost out to this law'n'order-floutin' procedural thriller, though not by much. Either of them would've been fine by me. This story's victory was perfect, I figured, since its publication was set for 1 October and I was #Spooktobering with mysteries and thrillers instead of ghosts and werewolves and the like. And now, mirabile dictu, it's #Noirvember when the review comes out!

It really shows that this author is also a screenwriter. His first pages are a lights-and-sirens, pursuit-copter assisted chase that whipped past as fast as it would've on screen. The major notes in the symphony the author's prepared for us are clear; the problem he's decided to write about couldn't be more timely. What isn't ordinary is the PoV of a cop, a Black cop, on police brutality. On the department's culture, on what it means to try to be a Good Cop, a good Black man, and a decent human being in a system that has little room for any of those identities.

Trevor "Finn" Finnegan stepped off the straight and narrow early in his career at LAPD. What he did is not a mystery; but you should find out from his story. The results of his ethical compromise are simple: He climbed the ladder faster than a Black man should've and is roundly resented by all for it. He has a toxic relationship to his "high yellow" father (and hasn't it been an age since I've heard that term!), an ex-LAPD officer, that was always going to be fraught but never got better. Neither knew how to make it so...his mother's early death didn't help. The men aren't going to be besties, but they have a basic world-view compatibility: No one gives you nothing, just decide how much you'll pay for it.

But what Finn decides to pay is a price that doesn't make for good reading...or living. What happens as a result of this price, this devil's bargain, is devastating. It changes everything. I think it's a change for the better, but that's by no means sure....

Why this is only getting a 3.5-star rating from me comes down to the ghastly sexual politics. There's a pair of women with whom horndog Trevor is involved, in a weird off-kilter way, and his actions do not speak well of him. In relation to one of the women, he all but throws her privileged whiteness in her face while enacting, apparently unironically, male privilege in its most extreme form. He then imagines the other woman in his life will condone, forgive, and accept his bad behavior...and Author Clark's construct of her makes that not improbable. Ugh.

My revolted reservations aside, the writing is deft, it fails to fall into speechification as it sometimes hints at doing, and the plot is one I feel strongly needs to be told. Good people doing bad things for what they tell themselves are noble aims is an evergreen because it's not just relatable it's instructive. I'll read the next book in what promises to be a very interesting series.

THE BRIGHTEST PLACE IN THE WORLD, facts made into fiction to tell The Truth

THE BRIGHTEST PLACE IN THE WORLD
DAVID PHILIP MULLINS
University of Nevada Press
$24.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Inspired by true events, The Brightest Place in the World traces the lives of four characters haunted by an industrial disaster. On an ordinary sunny morning in 2012, a series of explosions level a chemical plant on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The shock waves are felt as far away as Fremont Street. Homes and businesses suffer broken windows and caved-in roofs. Hundreds are injured, and eight employees of the plant are unaccounted for, presumed dead.

One of the missing is maintenance technician Andrew Huntley, a husband and father who is an orbital force in the novel as those who loved him grapple with his loss. Andrew’s best friend, Russell Martin—an anxiety-plagued bartender who calms his nerves with a steady inflow of weed—misses him more than he might a brother. Meanwhile Emma, Russell’s wife—a blackjack dealer at a downtown casino—tries to keep her years-long affair with Andrew hidden. Simon Addison, a manager at the plant who could have saved Andrew’s life, is afflicted by daily remorse, combined with a debilitating knowledge of his own cowardice. And then there’s Maddie, Andrew’s only child, a model high-school student whose response to the tragedy is to experiment with shoplifting and other deviant behavior.

Against the sordid backdrop of Las Vegas—and inspired by the PEPCON disaster of May 4, 1988—this engaging novel is a story of grief and regret, disloyalty and atonement, infatuation and love.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED ME WITH A DRC AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: When disaster occurs, sudden and unexpected and yet limited in scope, all those caught in its extent are changed. Almost all of us has had this experience. As one ages, it's a given that it's occurred more than once...and it never, ever gets easier or routinized. The emotional toll is different each time, and there are certain practical responses that kick in with habituation (eg, people always gotta eat, so bring a casserole). But the effect is always profound, transformative, and painful. (I've spoken to many people who've had happy calamities, eg childbirth, who express surprise at how much it hurts to alter one's life, habits, friend-circle.)

One fine day, Las Vegas, Nevada, is the epicenter of a small seismic event. There are seismometers that record the Richter-scale measurement (for us oldsters; younger folk will call it the moment magnitude measurement abbreviated Mw); but it takes a novelist to record the magnitude of the moments after the event. Author David Philip Mullins, associate professor of English at Omaha's Jesuit institution Creighton University, took that on and has done a fine job of showing how a deadly explosion cracks much more than land and buildings.

Andrew works for manager Simon at a chemical plant outside Las Vegas. The plant's aging; the community isn't enthusiastic about its presence at all—what was once the edge of town isn't anymore—and there are no corporate plans for moving it because, if the desert of a sparsely populated state isn't excited enough to have the jobs, what's a nicer place going to think? Heck, these ingrates are even iffy about the nearby marshmallow plant! (Who wants to live with the eternal scent of S'mores on the breeze? Yuck.) But Andrew has a wife, Juliet, and a high-school senior daughter, Maddie, to support. He goes to work; he worries about safety, sure, but groceries don't buy themselves. And his bestest bud ever, Russell, tends bar nearby, so he has a safe atmosphere to relax in before going home to his womenfolk.

Russell isn't quite there in the womenfolk department, having his One True Love, poker-dealing wife Emma to go home to but no kids. Not that she, or he, wants a kid. Russell is prey to anxiety and self-worth issues he medicates with (then still illegal) pot. He keeps himself to himself outside the bar, relying on Andrew and Emma to provide his social needs. He loves them both...he loves Maddie like a niece...he likes Juliet just fine. His life is, then, jogging along smoothly enough. And that's where Author Mullins places us in his first scene, this fine day we know is going to be all about change:

The glare of a mid-morning sun gives the interstate a kind of waxen luster that almost blinds him if he pays attention to it. An odor of exhaust permeates the atmosphere of his little sedan, charter buses and eighteen-wheelers making canyons of the lanes.

Beautiful evocation of an unlovely reality...how perfect that Russell is the one noticing. Because Russell is a man whose world explodes in so many ways when he hears a huge explosion, sees roiling smoke rising, from the driver's seat.

Maddie is in school when the explosion cracks her world wide open. She is called to the office, and some well-meaning Charlie Brown-trumpeting adults do what they can to inform her of her life, for real not for drama, being over. It does not compute. How could it? No one is prepared for death, not really, and still less a young woman with pressing life decisions...schools, majors...to make. Her well-loved father? There every day, and now you say he's what?

A chitalpa tree shaped like a tuning fork grows from a brick-edged plot in the concrete. Fat pink flowers droop from the branches, the petals like stockings hung to dry.

What a grieving young woman, suddenly not going to be her father's daughter anymore, will notice:

It's a Chitalpa tashkentensis, a drought-hardy blooming big shrub/small tree, and its pinkness does rather look like laundry left on the line to droop in the blasting, battering sunshine. I can see it standing out enough against the general dun-colored desert landscape and Las Vegas's stunted, dun-colored ordinary buildings to make it snag the eye of a deeply shocked and still numb young person.

Someone who has experienced a sudden and unexpected loss will recognize the pattern of fixating on a trivial, familiar object, something that grounds you in the present; then Maddie does something else predictable but that will always catch others by surprise. She responds to the authority figures urging her to stay there, to stay safe in their minds, by rebelling. She knows she should stay put but she can't. She has to move, so she aims herself at the place that's changed the most. Home.

Home means Mom, Juliet, the widow. And the house. The ravaged house that they quite clearly can't live in for a while. Can they even conceive of what it will take to fix the house? Let alone their lives, their new and now forever changed lives–plural. One of the first things to go when a parent dies is the older child's existing relationship to the surviving parent. It simply evaporates. It sometimes takes a minute for the parties to realize that it's evaporated, though:

Crunching glass as she circled the living room in her heels, her mother raved about the explosions in a manner that seemed to belong to an actress from one of the old movies they always show on AMC and Showtime: Meryl Streep or Glenn Close.

Feeling old yet? Old movies with Glenn Close? Wait, what? Old movies have Bette Davis in them, not the divine Miss Close or Miss Streep! *sigh* But that's the least of the changes wrought by this day, the opening of the age gulf. Juliet, a closet smoker, offers Maddie a cigarette from her frozen-food-concealed stash.

BAD JULIET. NO NO NO! This awful misjudgment will, in the end, cause some repercussions that no one could've foreseen....

But families come in flavors, the biological and the logical. Russell, let us not forget, is grieving his all-but-brother Andrew. He and Emma go to eat after the spiffy obsequies of Andrew's bodyless memorial, as Juliet has neither house to host, nor inclination to feed, the attendees of Andrew's service. Andrew was the one responsible for Emma noticing Russell in the first place! He was so central to Russell's happiness with his low-friction life. He asked Emma for her number at Andrew's behest...he and Emma included Andrew in their bar-centered socializing, far less often Juliet...are y'all's alarm bells ringing yet? Mine were...and here's Emma speaking to Russell about Andrew's death over their post-service meal:

"How can a person go away forever? Here and then not here—it doesn't compute."
"I know," Russell says.
"None of it makes any sense."
"None of it does."
"I just wish..."
"What," he says.
"It's like he vanished. It defies...I don't know. Logic. No warning, no nothing. It's so crazy to me."

Tearful bewilderment over your husband's bestie's death? C'mon! Everybody knows what time it is now! Except poor Russell. He's miffed she's hogging the spotlight that rightfully is his over his (he thinks) greater loss. Oh Russell...

And there's also the pink Victoria's Secret slip Russell once came across while looking in her closet for a spare hangar—he's never seen her wear it. She's rarely in the mood for sex anyway, and when she is, or pretends to be, she puts forth a bored, lazy effort that fills him with shame and makes the whole thing reek of an obligation.

DUDE!! There is as of that instant NO excuse for not being sure that you're not her main squeeze, just her husband. And c'mon, you have to know who is. It's too painful to admit to yourself? Good gawd, man, what's worse: Knowing but not saying, or saying and ending things? The crisis is reached and Russell, happily hazy superannuated bartender Russell, has to jump. Which way?

But strangest of all is the case of Manager Simon. His secret is revealed early in the book. It explains, but doesn't excuse, a lot of the truly skeevy shit he pulls...but I ain't a-tellin'. His life is farther along its trajectory than the other characters' lives are.

Simon thinks with sadness of {his two college-student children's} recent entry into adulthood, youth fluttering behind them like a shirt taken off on a windy beach.

An image that captivates me. And a very sad thing to experience as a parent; also exhilarating, liberating, terrifying on so many levels. (One thing no one tells you about adulthood is that you never, ever have an unmixed emotion after it really kicks in.) His managerhood, his whole career, is sloughing off like skin from a nasty burn. He feels so awful about his character as it's been revealed to him. He makes a concerted effort to Do Something positive, helpful, kind. Juliet's house is a disaster! Her yardwork needs doing...I'll go do it. And while I'm at it, I'll just...improve...the landscaping....

It is, I'm sad to say, a misfire.

He doesn't peep in her windows at night—nothing like that. He doesn't own any binoculars, and he's never taken a photo of her. Simon gets no sexual pleasure from spying on Juliet. He isn't a criminal or a pervert.
–followed by–
"Stay," Juliet says, looking at him now. "Please."

Okay...I get that she's wildly flailing for solid ground after her entire existence is savaged by disaster. But she's just poured richly merited contumely on his head while *sitting*down*to*coffee* with him...we're already stretching my credulity a bit too far...but then she asks him to stay when he's prepared to do the right thing at last and leave her alone?!?

So. There it is...alone. Is that enough to explain this lunatic, irresponsible behavior?

This is a seriously squicky moment, and I was losing my sense of trust in Author Mullins. Another troubling, though seriously less so, event comes as Russell essentially carries off his minor not-really-niece for an impromptu camping trip a good way away from Vegas. (I'm shouting at the screen at this point, "CALL YOUR MOTHER YOU SIMPLETON! EVEN IF YOUR IDIOT FAKE-UNCLE'S TOO HIGH TO DO IT!" Luckily, Russell isn't that stupid and leaves Juliet a message or I'd've chucked this book at the wall.) At least nothing heinous can happen while they're together.

Juliet has such a rough road in this story, trouble from every angle. Dead husband, adolescent daughter going through some serious problems, family issues with Russell (the cops? really?), and for goodness sake this whole Simon thing! But here's the problem, Juliet: You're your own worst enemy. Like everyone else in the world, right? And what Juliet gets herself up to is the most gigantically reactive response to death a person can have. It's *almost* too much, but I know from experience how very real it is.

Author Mullins is a debut novelist, though no stranger to writing. His first book, Greetings from Below, won the 2009 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction and was published by Sarabande Books in the US, Salt Publishing in the Commonwealth countries after winning the 2010 International Walter Scott Prize for Short Stories. His stories, then, have attracted attention and praise; stories operate on a different emotional logic than do novels. It is that sense of mismatched logic that is the source of my missing half-star rating. The novel I've reviewed is unquestionably a novel and the writing is high quality. I'm still left, however, with some lingering longings, some unmet needs for novel characters to develop. This isn't a family saga, so I wasn't hoping for the history of the participants. This isn't a Bildungsroman, so I wasn't expecting a central PoV character to Develop and Change. But as a novel of relationships and their mutability under pressure, I wanted the people to make their choices and cause their changes.

Even in the aftermath of a catastrophe, choices and changes can be occasions for characters to take control, exercise agency, and the people we follow around Las Vegas and environs are curiously acted upon and not acting. This is completely understandable in the first half of the book, as the ripples of the disaster propagate. It is increasingly troublesome for me as the novel progresses.

The point of going on this trip is to see sights you haven't before so I will leave the ending to your private reading. I've given you samples of the phrases I was particularly fond of. The vague wanting I experienced for more directed action is not remotely enough to have me encourage you skip the read! In fact, I encourage you to do the deed, buy the book, and ride the shockwave of this explosion. It is a rewarding experience.

THE NAKED BLOGGER OF CAIRO, necessary cruelty to my friends who need to wake up before it's too late

THE NAKED BLOGGER OF CAIRO
MARWAN M. KRAIDY
Harvard University Press
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Uprisings spread like wildfire across the Arab world from 2010 to 2012, fueled by a desire for popular sovereignty. In Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere, protesters flooded the streets and the media, voicing dissent through slogans, graffiti, puppetry, videos, and satire that called for the overthrow of dictators and the regimes that sustained them.

Investigating what drives people to risk everything to express themselves in rebellious art, The Naked Blogger of Cairo uncovers the creative insurgency at the heart of the Arab uprisings. While commentators have stressed the role of social media, Marwan M. Kraidy shows that the essential medium of political expression was not cell phone texts or Twitter but something more fundamental: the human body. Brutal governments that coerced citizens through torture and rape found themselves confronted with the bodies of protesters, burning with defiance and boldly violating taboos. Activists challenged authority in brazen acts of self-immolation, nude activism, and hunger strikes. The bodies of dictators became a focus of ridicule. A Web series presented Syria's Bashar al-Assad as a pathetic finger puppet, while cartoons and videos spread a meme of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak as a regurgitating cow.

The rise of digital culture complicates our understanding of the human body in revolutionary times. As Kraidy argues, technology publicizes defiance, but the body remains the vital nexus of physical struggle and digital communication, destabilizing distinctions between "the real world" and virtual reality, spurring revolutionary debates about the role of art, and anchoring Islamic State's attempted hijacking of creative insurgency.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

My Review: At a very low point in an ever-sinking US-Arab world relationship, this book could not have been a more timely read. The people the US Government left to twist in the wind...many of them Iraqis promised asylum in return for "betraying" their home country...all understand viscerally a fact the US and its soft, spoiled citizenry need to remember that they simply do not know: Tyrants and dictators use human bodies as propaganda tools to enforce their dominance.

The Gestapo and Putin's former employers, the KGB, are the most famous of these hideous organizations in the US. Worldwide, they are joined by our very own CIA, as well as innumerable unofficial, quasi-official, and openly governmental "state security" apparatuses. (Well, they can be enumerated, but I don't have the stomach for it.) The terror industry is thriving. Ask the poor souls who survived Abu Ghraib's horrors how they feel about the fact that the private contractors never faced prosecution or had to return one dime of the money the US Government paid them in spite of the fact many participated in the abuses. Ask the Kurds on the sharp end of Turkish weapons how their bodies are in danger of harm from a powerful, protected, well-armed state terrorism perpetrator of long standing. Human bodies, equipped with human souls, are routinely savaged and maimed by those whose idea of peace is best compared to the grave: Silent, dark, and unbroken.

At the dawn of the Anthropocene Epoch, in which climate change is a given and planning for it a joke, one small corner of the planet that we call the internet (no longer capitalized, please note) has taken a small degree of risk away from confronting tyrants. Author Kraidy, a most extraordinarily august person, with Directorates and Carnegie Fellowships and more under his belt, has taken a close look at the first Revolutions to be tweeted: The Arab Spring of 2010-2012. As we're now in the grips of a new political use of Twitter, it's deeply and rewardingly instructive to read this measured analysis of the role that social media did and did not play in this popular uprising.

The core of the book is the idea that, in a digital or analog revolution, the human body is central to our idea of the stakes, the purpose, and the desired result of any revolution. Seems sort of silly to say it...it's a given that a revolution is meant to free some group from the constraints put on them by another, which of necessity means the body is involved as it (at a minimum) carries around the wetware telling us we're not free. But extend the idea of revolution with its subtexts of battles and skirmishes of flesh into cyberspace and then what?

Aliaa al Mahdi in her native element, the internet
This photo ignited the entire Arab world, though I must say that it looks pretty darn tame to me. Far more provocative, in my opinion at least, is her protest photo in the pose of Lilith:

Her hearkening back to the Ur-protestor, the woman who refused to be subservient to a man and was cast off and out for her insolence, seems much more a statement of her principles and her point that a mere "beaver shot."

Author Kraidy then refines that daring act of the Naked Blogger into a more distilled and powerful meaning as part of "creative insurgency:"

...the notion of creative insurgency {explores} the mixture of activism and artistry characteristic of revolutionary expression and tracks the social transformation of activism into Art and ensuing controversies. At the heart of these processes is the human body as tool, medium, symbol, and metaphor...activists have deployed a rich array of art and media in fierce propaganda wars against murderous dictators. Mining the past for resonant symbols, creative insurgents execute daring physical performances, catchy slogans, memorable graffiti, and witty videos.

You'll need to be prepared for a long and upsetting journey into the hatefulness that our world never seems to run short of, I warn you now. That it is a view mediated by the art it has produced is not, I'm sorry to say, in any way a diminution of the horrors awaiting the bodies of dissenters across the globe. Author Kraidy, in his role as Chair in Global Media, Politics and Culture of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, is a man whose knowledge of the topic is deep and broad. His eternally-at-war Beirut childhood, and an adult return to head the American Studies department of the American University there while the Arab Spring was springing, had to make him extra sensitive to the topic. The art world, so dismissive of Arabic art and artists while celebratory of the reductive and racist Orientalism (most famously excoriated forty years ago in a book by Edward Said) that fed their Eurocentric concepts of Arabness, discovered in the Arab Spring protest art a vibrant and exciting new way to harness the rage of the "outsiders" into a profit- and control-centered "creative-curatorial-corporate context" in Author Kraidy's memorable words.

What you can expect, then, is a fascinating and thorough delve into a new, or newly technologically expanded, level of insurgency. Artists have never not responded to politics and the world's injustice...Hogarth, anyone?...but the avenues and the reach of their creative insurgency are alarming to the tyrants and heartening to all the resisters and rebels the modern world's manifold oppressions have spawned.

Introducing the last section of the book, Requiem for a Revolution?, Author Kraidy reminds us of some facts as we contemplate the apparent dimming down of revolutionary action around the world:

A more dangerous threat looms over the Arab uprisings: death, at every turn, awaits the body. "The Specter of Death" hovers menacingly above the rebels...If creative insurgency is an artful explansion of the human body in a public space that foments a new revolutionary identity, then the dark shadow of fatality—through guns, bombs, fire, chemicals, starvation, disease, exposure, torture, beheading—is a threat to creative insurgency. Handheld drollery that once enjoined Mubarak, Leave, My Arms Hurt"(from brandishing revolutionary banners), looks positively rosy when set against pictures of emaciated corpses, bloody limbs torn asunder, or the numbers, those stupefying, ballooning numbers, of bodies slaughtered, diseased, displaced.

And the Kurds continue to contribute their mite, all thanks to the 45th President of the United States of America.

SWEET AS CANE, SALTY AS TEARS...Cajun escapee comes Home, hijinks ensue

SWEET AS CANE, SALTY AS TEARS
KEN WHEATON
Open Road Media (NON-AFFILIATE Amazon link)
$7.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A freak accident forces a New Yorker to return to Louisiana and confront her Cajun past

There is nothing more dangerous than a spooked rhinoceros. It is just before lunchtime when Huey, the prized black rhino of Broussard, Louisiana, erupts from his enclosure, trampling a zoo employee on his way to a rampage in the Cajun countryside. The incident makes the rounds online as News of the Weird, and Katherine Fontenot is laughing along with the rest of her New York office when she notices the name of the hurt zookeeper: Karen-Anne Castille—her sister.

Fifty years old, lonely, and in danger of being laid off, Katherine has spent decades trying to ignore her Louisiana roots. Forced home by Karen-Anne’s accident, she remembers everything about the bayou that she wanted to escape: the heat, the mosquitoes, and the constant, crushing embrace of family. But when forced to confront the ghosts of her past, she discovers that escape might never have been necessary.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY OF THIS BOOK FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS-PLUS. THANK YOU.

My Review: It's funny how The Book for a particular mood will lurk until that moment hits. I needed an undemanding read, one that had nothing to do with the present-day mishegas I find both distasteful and unseemly; I found this book set in Obama-era New York City and central Louisiana. About a funeral, and coming to terms with what family means, what being in a family requires, how it is that Facebook has metastasized across nations and cultures.

Published in 2015, the book follows Katie-Lee, fiftyish and full of the fear that gives single people, as she returns to bury her little sister in the wake of a Facebook-meme-able death. In fact, she finds out about the life-ending from her colleagues at (unnamed but obvious) Advertising Age, their titters and chuckles about a humorous tale of a zookeeper trampled by a rhino morphing into a dreadful reality: That's her baby sister. The shamefaced colleagues try to make it right, but she's already launched the boat onto the Styx.

She has to Go Home. Not a flying visit. The Native has to Return. O frabjous day.

Must be done. She does it. Hijinks ensue; her Louisiana family, of her generation that is, are all au courant with the world as they see it on Facebook, which is a large player in the novel. No political crap yet, as this book was written and published before the 2016 debacle revealed how much influence the platform has over far more than one's personal life. No Instagram, glancing mentions of Twitter, and Katie-Lee's a screen addict whose phone running out of bars is a Biblical-level disaster. She has more in common with the grandkids of her sisters and brother than with them.

She honestly has no idea what to do with her sadness. Facing mortality for the first time is a life-changing experience. I did it in my 20s when the AIDS epidemic decimated the gay guys I knew and loved. I remember the emotions, the detachment from reality that realizing your own death is, inevitably and inexorably, coming closer and closer. Youth is gone in that moment, calendar be hanged. And Katie-Lee's life in Brooklyn isn't such that she's cushioned from the yawning emptiness of survivorhood.

Dig we must, chere.

The healing in this tale is family-wide, and inclusive. The tragedies of the past are present again as they always are at funerals; so are the fun memories that inject themselves into the geology of one's life. People whose acts are literally unforgivable are not forgiven, though that day will clearly come. But the truly unforgivable ones are the least likely to see themselves as needing forgiveness. THAT resonated. Author Wheaton nailed that. But he did so in a format, following a structure, and thus made sure the Lesson isn't A Sermon (and he includes one of those, a real dilly of a tone-deaf nightmare-from-Hell one at that) and moves on to the next laugh.

There's the rub. This is a nightclub act written as a book. These moments are Wheaton's Brooklyn party pieces connected into a gender-swapped story to make them cohesive. (In fact, Katie-Lee's ex Howie sounds to me like Wheaton's ex only maybe not gender-swapped, if you take my meaning.) They're not less real or funny for that, but the structure of the book does nothing to hide this fact from knowing eyes. I'm from South Central Texas, I had a mamaw and she was transplanted Cajun stock, and in the days when I had party pieces, they fit together much the same way as Wheaton's do. So my eyes weren't fogged up but rather cleared by reading the present action-memory-lesson structure.

I hurry to remind y'all that 3-1/2 stars is a positive rating. I'm not trying to blast the author; in fact I liked the rhythm, was comfortably on board with the predictability of it, and felt completely relaxed and happy and at home. Nothing much happens. No excitement apart from a funeral games scene that about popped my eyeballs out from trying not to wake my roomie up from the laughing.

So do I recommend this read? Sure, so long as you're a storytelling-voice addict. It's $8 on your ereader and that's not a lot to spend on four or five hours' vacation without moving. But if you're not in the mood to listen to stories, this will not be a successful trip to Opelousas. (Where Mamaw's family came from! Now, I don't *know* that any Tullises married any Wheatons, but I bet if we....)

MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER delivers appalled laughs, existential shivers, and great hopes for her next work

MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER
OYINKAN BRAITHWAITE
Doubleday (non-affiliate Amazon link
$11.99 ebooks, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: My Sister, the Serial Killer is a blackly comic novel about how blood is thicker—and more difficult to get out of the carpet—than water...

When Korede's dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what's expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel and a strong stomach. This'll be the third boyfriend Ayoola's dispatched in, quote, self-defence and the third mess that her lethal little sibling has left Korede to clear away. She should probably go to the police for the good of the menfolk of Nigeria, but she loves her sister and, as they say, family always comes first. Until, that is, Ayoola starts dating the doctor where Korede works as a nurse. Korede's long been in love with him, and isn't prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back: but to save one would mean sacrificing the other...

AUGUST 2019 UPDATE Oyinkan Braithwaite talks about How to Make Multiple Stabbings Funny! Interesting podcast.

I BORROWED THIS BOOK FROM MY LOCAL LIBRARY. THANK YOU!

My Review:

It takes a lot longer to dispose of a body than to dispose of a soul, especially if you don't want to leave any evidence of foul play.

And just like *that* I'm totally hooked. Second book this month set in Lagos; and second informed by a special Nigerian magical realism. (The other is David Mogo, Godhunter. Excellent as well.) This is a light entertainment, a shiny pretty costume-jewelry of a story that sets your readerly mood in its most attractive and colorful light. It's fun. It's got the Double Indemnityesque delight of a love triangle detonated by jealousy, the In Cold Bloodness of a crime spree done for the sheer hell of it, and that utterly madcap Thelma and Louisely sanitized violence and death.

Yes, sanitized. Korede reports, doesn't narrate, the aftermath of Ayoola's kills. She keeps the details sparse enough to inform but not nauseate. Korede stands between us and Ayoola the serial killer. (Thank goodness. I don't think I could've read a whole novel from Ayoola's PoV!) So we're safe, we're not going to the places Korede has seen, we needn't do what Korede does.

Those things that she must do in the name of Family, of keeping her sister from suffering the consequences of her actions, weigh on Korede. Naturally, I hear you snort, they would on anyone! It's a lot to carry. Korede needs a confessor and, since she's a hospital nurse, she is in the path of the perfect confessor-cum-confidant: Muhtar, a comatose patient with a neglectful family. She tells him Everything: details of the killings, the things she's had to do to cover them up, the awful sick feeling of being accessory to a serial killer...she talks it out to his vacant-but-breathing ears. How good it feels! Confession truly is good for the soul.

Not so much for the body...Muhtar wakes up. He's delighted to meet the nurse whose voice, in its daily presence, gave him the will to live and return. And yes, he remembers all. He's quite sure of what he heard Korede say. And do you know, he simply doesn't care because:

"...we are hardwired to protect and remain loyal to the people we love. Besides, no one is innocent in this world. Why, go up to your maternity ward! All those smiling parents and their newborns? Murderers and victims. Every one of them. 'The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.'"

"That's quite..." I can't complete the sentence. The words trouble me.

"It's a quote by Jim Morrison. I cannot lay claim to such wisdom."

Again, Author Braithwaite sweeps me away on her word-tide. She quotes Jim Morrison and does it well. She creates a full-fledged memorable character out of a comatose guy. This is a writer with chops. (You should forgive.) She has done the best for Korede that she can in giving her a sage and caring counselor, especially as the hospital is well-stocked with people she must not and cannot trust:

She smiles, hoping to put me at ease, but the expression does not sit comfortably on her face. ... I would be more at ease if the Joker were to smile at me.

Korede is, in that moment, trying to keep her cool as the Lagos police are returning her car to her possession after running tests for Ayoola's latest victim's blood on it. Her nosy colleague, trying to get the dirt, is doomed to failure as Korede does what she's best at: Stays mum. Protects Ayoola. Pretends she is doing a good thing, being loyal to and as always protecting her younger sister. Family first!

Besides, it's what Korede doesn't do...what in the end she chooses to allow to occur to someone over whom she rhapsodizes, "Is there anything more beautiful than a man with a voice like an ocean?"...that defines her as a moral actor. I disagree with her choice, and I would've liked a chance to convince her to change her mind. With a two-by-four to the knees if necessary. But Korede, as written, really couldn't have made a different choice, so here we are.

Overall, the story's pluses...new-to-me setting, cultural differences that kept me on my Google-fu, and an authorial style I found engaging...got me to a shade over four stars. It wasn't hard to get there. Where I just can't get to, though, is the place where this entertainment got itself onto the Booker Prize 2019 longlist! That makes no sense to me, because there are wonderful and delicious moments in this book to savor but it does nothing that's particularly innovative. At least not in my eyes. Many will disagree, I don't doubt.

As a read, this is a superior summer entertainment. It won, deservedly, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Mystery/Thriller in 2018. But it isn't High Art, and I don't think it set out to be. It is a first novel of great promise and I want to see Oyinkan Braithwaite's second one with great anticipatory glee.

LOT: Stories might as well be in post-apocalyptic Houston, but you NEED to visit now

LOT: STORIES
BRYAN WASHINGTON
Riverhead Books
$25.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

WINNER OF THE 32ND Lambda Literary Award—BEST GAY FICTION!

The Publisher Says: Stories of a young man finding his place among family and community in Houston, from a powerful, emerging American voice.

In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys.

This boy and his family experience the tumult of living in the margins, the heartbreak of ghosts, and the braveries of the human heart. The stories of others living and thriving and dying across Houston's myriad neighborhoods are woven throughout to reveal a young woman's affair detonating across an apartment complex, a rag-tag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, and a reluctant chupacabra.

Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world leaps off the page with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot is about love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

My Review: This is not, appearances to the contratry, autobiographical. It's art, inspired by lived life, and Author Washington isn't its only model. He knew the models better than privileged and pampered Reader Person can. But there's a smoothness and facility that's the hallmark of the born writer, the one who wouldn't fit in no matter what or where or how they grew up. He didn't live in Alief, or maybe he did exist in that space but he was always apart and different and queer...but mostly he was born to be a writer. As always, I will employ the Bryce Method and go story by story with my visceral impressions only lightly toned down and/or tarted up.

Lockwood is a quick hit of what it means to be down and out, illegal, and queer. Also black and queer.

Once, I asked Roberto if he liked it in Texas. He looked at me forever. Called it another place with a name.
Could be worse, I said. You could be back home.
Home's wherever you are at the time, said Roberto.
You're just talking. That doesn't even mean anything.
It would, he said, if you knew you didn't have one.

I live in the same world as these boys and might as well be Arcturian. Yep. This one's a winner. Anything that can tell you that you don't know one single goddamned thing about the city, the state, the country that spawned you? That's a voice you need to listen to.

Alief gives the ragged and rowdy account of the end of several lives, two cheating bastards and a fool of a husband, with the full force and majesty of the Neighborhood behind it. Mistakes, obliviousness, the eternal unchanging voraciousness for Story that makes gossip so damned toxic yet irresistible, addictive. Like...well...reading, if we're all honest, dipping into the universes we weren't invited to inhabit. In this universe we're visiting, the Greek chorus of the folks living there is used to best effect as it dissects not predicts. A good choice, Author Washington.

610 North, 610 West locates us in Houston's geometry, using it as a quick way to orient us to the emotional poles of little man narrator's life. Ma isn't what Pa wants; he finds something he does want; life goes on, the myriad casualties spread in Houston's circular blast radius. Javi the vicious brother starts out ans stays shitty, abusive, homophobic; Jan the eldest sister vanishes, as so many without moorings but with ambitions do. Who's left? The gay little brother! Shocking! he murmured, clutching his pearls. Ma and her queer son. How did that ever happen.

Shepherd follows one young half-Jamaican to his summer of love, his Jamaican whore-cousin (the soursop woman!)'s summer of rest and recovery from multiple tragedies, his sister's sexed-up summer of post-college freshman-year freedom; lots of firsts, not a lot of happiness. Unlike the lower-class family's stories, the parents are window dressing. The boy doesn't become a man, but he knows he's going to and it isn't a comfortable thought. His cruelty to a kind woman is a harbinger of bad things to come, I fear.

Wayside a whole eight pages of horror. "Rick was...the most light-skinned out of all of us, and he carried himself like all of kindness in a bottle." We get down to the double horror of: Spoiler Alert!
...
...
...
When we made it to the body, my brother snatched my hand. He made me touch Rick's face. He told me this was what happened to fags.
...
...
...
And that, mijos, is the worst and nastiest thing ever felt, thought, said. Our little man narrator doesn't report this with a flinch, just a numb and vacant, deadened, dead-end voice.

Bayou brings us the chupacabra, myth made flesh, that can't or won't save two of life's losers. Boys with names like TeDarus and Mixcoatl don't even inherit the meek's mite of World. They call out for attention, demand to be seen, heard, but when they get it they don't know what to do with it. Mix, poor thing, is gay in a world that needs someone to hate for being Other so he's it. TeDarus is a space-taker. Nothing can save them from oblivion. Nothing is going to change or get better. Like the chupacabra they found, they slip away and there's no proof they were ever here.

Lot is the heart of the book, the heart of the family. Everything comes to a head, breaks, spills its rage-pus down the sides of the boil that these wretched people fester inside. Javi the hater, Jan the jilter, father, mother...all just don't want to see any of the cesspit's contents they're grinding the youngest's face into. RUN I want to scream, take money for the sex, escape however you can! And I know I'm shoutin' down the well. He's not even going to inherit the cesspit.

South Congress has poor Guatemalan illegal Raúl hooked into small-time street-drug sellin' Avery; it's a sad if common tale of someone who was never going to do more than just get by getting by in a place that hates him for being, won't forgive him for existing. Then how that, finally, in the end, blows into smithereens is a shock because I wasn't expecting Author Washington to leave Raúl with an opportunity that he's smart enough to seize but dreads succumbing to. Pungent and packed.

Navigation is such a freakin' hopeless mess of a life story getting *worse* FFS as Nameless the Narrator rejects two...two!...separate chances to get his shit in order, maybe get above water by a flippin' nostril, but NOOOOOO

Javi would be proud. /sarcasm

Peggy Park is like the Biblical begats in Chronicles, only this time it's baseball in the ghetto. Bored me. Hard to do with baseball stories, but yeah.

Fannin is the last will and testament of Jan, the jilting sister, who saw her father in a bad way one last time but did nothing. I didn't like her before, now I really despise her. The world she's made is built on, not a lie exactly, a hollow place...an excavation of the root-ball her life sprang from. People like that? I don't envy them one single possession.

Waugh teaches us the lesson that Love's got shit to do with reality but will fuck you up worse than anything else. Poke loves Rod but betrays him by leaving him at Rod's lowest point; all to be with Emil the middle-aged refugee from a place that no longer exists (I'm guessing Lebanon based on his age and backstory). He loves Poke, but can't ever figure in to his picture Poke's love of his calling, the streets. Rod? No one sees it, no one says "oh yeah, that guy" and no one, when he goes looking, can tell Poke anything.

There's no closure to be had on betrayal.

Elgin is the beauty of failure, the glory of losing, the passionate need to fuck up again. Nicolás. The name that means People's Victory. He alone of all his people...Javi, dead in the ground; Mam booked out to Louisiana; Pa? *shrug*; Jan the arriviste, dreams drowned by Harvey...stayed in his place, stayed long after he lost the will to make a life; he won the loser's lottery by existing, just that, as his life spun out of reach. Sex with one-nighters does nothing to fill you up no matter how big a dick he has. Then what? Go to the sea, sit in the water, leave a sad and lonely and worthy man in your bed and....

What's left is existing before exiting. All there is.

Those two-tenths of a point off perfect are for the tedium of Peggy Park and the last-minute narrator naming. Best left, or used throughout, as this feels contrived to me.

THURSDAY, 1:17 P.M. is a very satisfying summer read as well as a deep pool of subtext

THURSDAY, 1:17PM
MICHAEL LANDWEBER
Coffeetown Press
$13.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Time stopped at 1:17 p.m. on a beautiful Thursday afternoon in Washington, DC. Duck is the only person moving in a world where all other living beings have been frozen into statues in an endless diorama. Duck was already in limbo, having lost his mother to cancer and his father to mental illness. Now, faced with the unimaginable, he approaches his dilemma with the eye of an anthropologist and the heart of a teenager trying to do the right thing under the strangest of circumstances. Ultimately, he realizes that while he doesn’t understand the boundaries between friendship and love, that uncertain territory may be the key to restarting the world.

Says Landweber, “We’ve all wanted to stop time. Thursday, 1:17 p.m. started with the idea that this particular wish could turn into a curse if you weren’t able to start time up again. After the initial thrill of being the last person moving in a frozen world, how would a person deal with the loneliness? Or the temptation to do things that you would never consider doing in the fully functioning world? But what interested me most was turning that potential nightmare into a story about one person finding meaning in a world that makes no sense.”

My Review: This book was offered to me by the publicist, and after many days, I am cheerfully offering my sincere opinion of it: Good stuff!

I think what drew me to the book in the first place was the conceit of a boy living in stopped time after his mother's awful death from cancer, and his father's descent into a world of his own, one so deep that he can't reach out or be reached by anyone. Not even his son. That's isolation! Jacob, known as Duck to friends, experiences something amazing and unprecedented as he escapes home, where his mother's body is being removed: He walks into an intersection without paying attention, in front of a speeding Mercedes that's running a red light, and...nothing. No impact. It's as if time has stopped.

It has. For everyone except Duck. He's alive, he's mobile, he's a free agent in a world of statues. His adventures are just beginning. I'm sure most of us have thought what we'd do in Duck's shoes; his first response is to test the situation, determine if this is a real event by examining the world, experimenting with gravity...still works...and other forces, which don't. ELectromagnetism is halted. Anything relying on electricity like computers and human brains is offline. Water won't flow unless Duck is touching it. More parameters of the social world start to vanish from Duck the longer his situation lasts. He sleeps wherever he is whenever he's tired. It's 1:17p.m. on a lovely sunny day, unchangingly 71 degrees (Fahrenheit)...when to sleep? That's always a problem for those out of step with the rest of the world. And boy is Duck out of step! He runs around naked, playing pranks, redistributing cash from wealthy places like stores and rich mall-goers' wallets, tipping frozen people over, generally acting like a 17-year-old on a bender should. Oh yes, there's all kinds of good stuff he can eat and drink in the restaurants of frozen Washington DC, just so long as he's careful to eat already prepared food, nothing from the kitchen that hasn't been plated. Cooking has, obviously, stopped with the electricity. Natural gas, since it flows mostly like water, isn't moving either.

So here he is, in an abundant world, with easy enough access to all the necessities and luxuries; nothing, then, to do but think. Process the painful past, since he's in an eternal present. He visits his father in the loony bin, trying to make the world start again by using his father's mental disturbance as an oracle. This isn't helpful, but Duck makes the most of it by really digging into his memories of his Dad before the final psychotic break that sent Dad to the bin: Stealing a Duck, the tour bus/boat that's seen in many cities with rivers or big lakes, since he needs an ark for himself and his son to ride out the flood that's coming. Only it doesn't come. A flood of cops, yes; a flood of scared tourists as Dad drives the Duck into the reflecting pool on the Mall. Hence Duck's nickname, a brand of shame until his mother sends him to a private school. Even that wouldn't have helped had it not been for the cool cat in class, Carlos, taking a shine to Duck and enveloping him in the aura of popularity. Duck, Carlos, Mackenzie the uber-rich girl, and Grace the uber-smart and pretty darn rich girl. The Gang of Four. Duck is safe at last.

Nothing stops cancer, but his friends at least keep Duck occupied. They all care about him very much, even Grace and her surgeon parents after they delve into his Mom's condition and give Duck the same news he's already heard: No hope. Terminal. Sad for you, but we will always have a place for you in our home. And he repays them by storming out of their house, blaming them for his mother's death. (I have to think that, as parents of teenagers themselves, they get where he's coming from and hold no grudges.)

It's Grace that Duck wrongs the most, treating her with offhanded discourtesy. He stands her up for her graduation party, he blows her off socially, it's a wonder she doesn't stick a knife in his eye. Mackenzie does much the same thing to him. Carlos is above it all, his diplomat parents having instilled in him the ability to slip unscathed through muddy emotional waters filled with piranhas.

While the world is stopped, Duck looks into his friends' houses and lives: Mackenzie, well, she's not the little lady he'd hoped for; Carlos's parents are in mid-fuck, which clearly isn't something Duck would see any other time or way; Grace is nowhere to be found. Not at her summer internship. Not at home. Duck gets worried enough to check their secret stashes: Lunchboxes, vintage lunchboxes that Grace compelled Duck to buy with her. They agreed to keep their you'll-know-when-it's-time secret stuff in them. He finds Grace's suicide note. It directs him to her family's cabin seventy miles away.

Riding a stolen bike with a kid carrier attached, Duck makes it to West Virginia after riding through a thunderstorm. He takes the chance to get close to a bolt of lightning, not something you're ever likely to be able to do safely when time is unstopped, but who wouldn't want to see what lightning really looks like?

What he finds makes him into the ultimate MacGyver master. Grace has thrown herself out the window, aiming for some spiky rocks. Duck creates a soft landing place for her by stealing every mattress and sofa cushion from all the houses he can see. That way when he touches Grace's foot and she falls, she won't be hurt. And that's now of paramount importance to him because, in addition to her suicide note, Grace also left a packet of Carlos's letters to her, loving, warm letters indicating a relationship Duck knew nothing about between two of his best friends. Grace has clearly told Carlos that her real feelings are for Duck, and Carlos knows just what to do: break off their relationship and go back to being friends. Duck reads the letters and knows, the way you do, that he's in love with Grace and always was.

In the end, Duck does unfreeze the world after he has made as many things right as he can. He is now sorted out, emotionally stable in his grief, and ready to meet life on life's terms. It's a good, satisfying way to end a book. This is very much a summer page-turner with subtleties that you'll have to read for yourself. Enjoyed as a tale, it's fine; looking into the shadows cast by the rich subtexts all through the book makes the experience much richer. But either way, read it soon. It will repay you with interest.

BROWN BOTTLE: A NOVEL by Sheldon Lee Compton, honed like a knife & wielded without mercy

BROWN BOTTLE: A Novel
SHELDON LEE COMPTON
Bottom Dog Press
$17.00 trade paper, OR $8.00 Kindle, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Wade “Brown Bottle” Taylor is an alcoholic trying to protect his nephew Nick from the hardness of their region, Eastern Kentucky, and the world in general. He must end Nick's involvement with drugs and drug dealers in the area, and, fueled by his love for his nephew, Brown knows he must be the one to intervene to save him. But in order to save Nick, Brown must first save himself, overcoming a lifetime spent convinced he was unworthy. Brown Bottle's journey is one of selflessness and love, redemption and sacrifice, if only for a time.

My Review: When I saw that Donald Ray Pollock, of KNOCKEMSTIFF fame, called the author of this novel "a hillbilly Bukowski," that was it. I asked Bottom Dog Press for a review copy and was blessed with one. And let me say this right up front: Pollock's assessment is spot-on.

"Brown Bottle" is the unkind-yet-accurate nickname given to Wade Taylor, co-centerpiece of the story's arc with Stan Collins. Brown is an alcoholic and a Vietnam vet. Stan is a plain, common-or-garden alcoholic. They live in Portville, Port County, the farthest eastern stretch of Kentucky. Coal was king until the 1970s, and now opiods and meth are the kings. Sadly, the two alcoholic tough men (who don't indulge in drug use) each have a beloved relative involved with drugs. Brown's nephew Nick, abandoned by his mother when at the most annoying rebellious stage of adolescence, is a drug user and petty thief; Stan's little brother Tuck is the picture of the repulsive little guy who deals to feel big:

Tuck had always been made smaller made than Stan. Narrow shoulders, tiny hands and short fingers. Even as a young man his brown eyes were always watering like he'd been crying and his face never took hair well. What he had instead were four or five patches of hair that looked like a cluster of bee stingers popping straight out from his cheeks.

It's not tough to work out the conflict that inevitably will arise between the strong protectors of these weak men. Nick is the North Star in Brown's sky, the one decent thing he thinks that's ever come out of Port County Taylors. He felt that way about Mary, Nick's mama, until she walked away and left Brown in charge (or not, it didn't seem to matter to her as she skedaddled to Ohio with some kind of snake-oil sellin' preacher) of Nick's arrival into manhood.

And here's Stan, living across the highway from Tuck's trailer, watching the streams of vehicles come, park, and go in minutes flat. He hates that this crazy business has made his brother a prisoner of drug suppliers and users, skittering from pillar to post in order to balance supply and demand. He himself is a disabled miner, a man of no use to anyone except his wife Hen (short for Henry, don't know why she's named that) and wanting to save Tuck. This being the Appalachians with the culture of self-reliance and clannishness that is native to hardscrabble places the world over, Stan doesn't figure on calling in the troopers unless forced to. He figured without Brown's iron determination to cut Nick off at the supply end of his drug habit.

So what's a protective uncle to do? Scare the living daylights out of Tuck, that's what. Bust in the trailer door, shake the little rat around some, make sure he thinks twice and doesn't sell Nick another snort. Good plan. But Hen, though she's not Tuck's biggest fan, also has a reason to keep the scrawny little shit alive: Stan's disability and her joblessness don't make ends meet, but when Hen sells some opiods on the side for Tuck the books balance. Like most American households, the wife is the paymaster, so Stan's oblivious to the source of their continued (relative) comfort. Hen sees Brown breaking in the trailer door, fears the worst, and calls the cops.

Now cops aren't, public opinion aside, blind, deaf, and dum-dums. The local deputy, Dan, knows there's mischief being made in Tuck's trailer. He has reason to worry because his only daughter is dating Brown's nephew Nick, and that can't be good for her sobriety. Since Dan's local aristocracy (used to run the local IGA Foodliner, inherited from his daddy), he takes it as a personal affront on all levels that he can't quite prove the reality of illegality going on under his nose. He can, and does, have the place under surveillance, so when Hen's 911 call is radioed out, the response is swift. Not so good for Brown, caught in the act of smacking Tuck around. But no one in Port County doesn't know Brown was a babykiller in Vietnam so they're all scared of him; he's a drunk, so they're scared he'll wow out while sloshed; and his crusade to save his nephew isn't news, either. Sentenced to AA meetings, big whoop.

Nick and Ashley, Dan's daughter, are late to the party at the trailer, finding Tuck gone and the place empty. They decide it's time for them to be big kids about their habit and break into the trailer to steal some supplies. It turns out the supplies are very, very abundant. The plan changes from steal some and use to steal all and set up as dealers. It's Tuck's way of buying really nice stuff for his crappy trailer and they have plans to set up house and get married when they get some money....

What they don't know is that Brown used the AA meeting to make some discoveries and now has Tuck all trussed up in his hunting camp, a place full of Brown's past:

{T}here hung that mirror still. Splotches like mold or something had collected from the corners toward the middle, but Brown was able to see enough of himself in it to feel a fair amount of disgust. No more than the usual amount. He scratched at his chin growth. Did a rat eat your razors? That's what his daddy would say. He wished his chin jutted out more like Clint Eastwood or James Dean or whotheheckever. Instead, you could barely see his chin, it hid so far back against his neck.

The wheels of tragedy are now set in motion. Self-loathing, the need to redeem something from a painfully wasted life, and the sheer revulsion of the strong for the weak cause Brown to plan Tuck's carefully hidden demise. Sadly, Tuck's victims Nick and Ashley have also concluded that Tuck needs taking out; it's sad because, unlike Brown, these two can't bring themselves to do the deed personally, so they turn to Port County's resident no-fail contract killer:

There were a lot of botched kills throughout the eastern part of Kentucky when the work fell outside his control. Six or seven years ago, a man from Perry County was shot point blank in the head and left for dead in the middle of downtown. Problem was, the bullet had traveled between the man's scalp and his skull halfway across his head and exited the same way it had entered on the other side. The whole thing had left him with only fingernail-sized contusions on both sides of his head. He identified the guy who shot him and saw him arrested and convicted of attempted murder.
Now, it's true that a situation like that was a rare one, but part of doing a job right was minimizing the chance for something to go wrong.

The callousness of this internal monologue is courtesy of Fay, an Ulsterman and killer for his side in Ireland. He's known to everyone in the area, and they're more scared of him than of Brown or the law. Good reason to be, after all, since he lives quite nicely on no visible means of support and there's no shortage of disappeared, presumed dead, enemies in Port County. Nick and Ashley decide to hire him to eliminate Tuck while making the mistake of telling Fay how they plan to get the money to pay him.

All hell breaks loose.

Stan's hunting for Tuck. Brown's hunting for Nick and Ashley. Fay's abusing Ashley's mother to get the name of her supplier, Hen. Hen's trying to stop everything from spinning out of control. Dan's sure that if he gets hold of one of these people, he'll unravel the whole mess without any noticeable bloodshed (maybe Tuck dies, oh dear oh well). Fay and Stan and Hen and Brown and Tuck...it's a helluva ride, there are deaths good and bad, and in the end the price owed to the law is paid by Nick and Ashley, who go to prison for possession with the intent to deal narcotics since they stole Tuck's stock.

In the end, Brown's is the one purpose served. Nick comes out of prison early, sober at last. He knows to whom he owes his thanks, the thanks he's too late to deliver:

He's on the school bus and Uncle Wade is standing outside the window. The bus hasn't pulled out yet and Uncle Wade is punching the air and ducking his head and giving him a thumbs up sign and then a big smile. The big smile says do not worry. It says you can do this. ... His smile says a lot and so do his punching hands and his hooked thumbs, and before everything else it can possibly say, it says the thing Nick needs most. The big smile says I love you.

Too late, too late; a job well done by a man ill-used from every quarter.

Sheldon Lee Compton jumps onto my must-buy list with this dizzyingly fast-paced, beautifully choreographed, blood-soaked book. And will someone please tell Norman Reedus that his Oscar-winning role's right here in this book?