Dying Breath

Read These:Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow


Welcome to Hard Times by E.L. Doctorow


Chicago Loop by Paul Theroux


Black Sunday by Thomas Harris


Bluebeard By Kurt Vonnegut


Time's Arrow by Martin Amis


A House for Mister Biswas by V.S. Naipaul


Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes

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ALL THE JOYS OF BLOODY VENGEANCE
By
WR BULL (Part 3)


You come to my house today? My house? Talk to my woman?
Who tell you to come? You come to my house, you mus' be mad. You goin' learn something tonight. You don' have nuttin dere. She don' wan' see you. She don' wan' know you. You are not nuttin'. You undastan'?

He slaps him with the gun and then holds it to his head, needing to see fear in Neill's eyes. Neill gives it to him. Slides off the bed to his knees on the floor and begs for his life. He even tries to piss himself but it won't come. Instead he has an erection. He promises never to come to the house again. The piece de resistance? He offers to blow the man. He is so sorry, so terrified that he is willing to humiliate himself. He watches for confusion in the man's eyes. The moment when he is so distracted by this that his brain loses contact with his trigger finger. When it comes his hand comes up with the scalpel and plunges it into the man's crotch. Then he stands, slicing upward as he does, and reaching out for the gun. No problem, both hands go down to the crotch. Other guy doesn't even know what happened when he sees the gun pointed at him. Big Black is on his knees on the floor, in shock, wondering if what he thought just happened, really did.

Behind the gun, the world is a better place.

He fires once and misses. Instead of running, the other one falls to his knees as well. He walks closer and fires into the younger man's right eye.

The other is bleeding profusely and sweating. He looks up at Neill but doesn't see him, his face shiny and gray. Doesn't see anything except for the fact that his penis has become detached from the rest of his body. Neill puts the gun against Terry's new boyfriend's forehead and blows his brains out.

He steps out into the night. The air is cool and there are no sirens. It is clean, the rain having just fallen and he has a gun now. The smell of gunfire and blood in his nostrils he takes a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lights one. Menthols. Ah, the joy of bloody vengeance.

Cigarette smoked, he sets out to go kill his ex-girlfriend.

THE END.

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ALL THE JOYS OF BLOODY VENGEANCE
By
WR BULL (Part 1)


He was scarred in all kinds of new ways, new souvenirs, deeper and uglier than the ones he went in with, missing a tooth, smoking more than he had before, but he came out, came back home unraped, unbeaten, and less afraid than ever. He got a job with his uncle, working as a clerk in the mornings answering the phone and working the cash register. He got a room in Delford, a rough-drawn haphazard little town, no straight roads anywhere. He bought weed and sat by his window in the evenings and smoked and planned.

Oh, how he hated the world. He wanted to kill and kill and never stop killing. He wanted to walk into restaurants and dump a bucket of gasoline on somebody and set them on fire. He wanted to get a gun and fire tight groupings into walking bodies. He wanted to strangle, to decapitate. Thing was, now he could do it. Prison had given him the key to the hole where the animals were kept. Now all he wanted was for somebody to set him off.

There she was sitting on the veranda swing, the Great White Goddess in all her glory. She would see him standing behind the tree and imagine he still cared, still the little loser who loved her and couldn't find anybody else who wanted him. He was the one she had wanted when she still thought he was stronger and blacker than he turned out to be. Yeah man, she got herself a real nigger now, big and black, and this one has money. After prison in Tennessee Neill found that the voices in his head are almost always African American. She was there on the swing looking happy like he had never been in her life and he wanted so much to kill her. Not slowly though, fast and bloody and hard. What did that say?
(END OF PART 1)

RUM PUNCH By Elmore Leonard

Mystery By Peter Straub

jebnit @ MindSay: "The Perfect ContractYou live your life knowing that you could die at any moment. Fine. You also live knowing that no matter what you are going to die.

Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island has something of a dramatic plot twist about two thirds of the way through, if you don't already know. I would be lying if I claimed to not have enjoyed this book. I liked the thrill of that moment when the gimmickery didn't feel like gimmickery, when I was genuinely surprised. That's rare for me, not that I'm smart or anything, just cynical about literary devices and tricky writer shit.

The story itself is about a pair of federal marshals arriving at an institution for the criminally insane to investigate the disappearance of an inmate, Rachel Solando, who is there for having drowned her children. This prison/mental hospital is on an island. It follows a line of interesting, if not particularly alarming, twists till about 3/4 of the way in we hit up against the stonewall of the big surprise. I won't spoil it for you. There are links to Amazon here. Don't be a hater.

I have two points to make about this book:

1. It strikes me that pretty much anybody (especially if they have a quirky personality) could be committed by their family should the family so desire. Think of any of the people you know over age 25 and let us say that you heard that they had been sent to a mental hosptital. Would it be that hard for you to come up with a reason? Something that you could think back to and say, ah, yes, I should have seen it coming? Look at those ugly pictures he has on his blog! What normal person would enjoy such things! I knew he was fucking nuts!

2. The surprise is not the kind where the writer has been thinking of this all along.If you've ever written a short story or a novel and tried to be cute with your endings, you know that surprise endings are fucking hard to pull off. The way it happens most easily, is for the ending to surprise you. You're writing along happily and then it hits you: what if I did this? Or this? I suspect that that is what happened here. You can see the narrative building the suspense in one direction, and then you can see where the lightbulb goes on.

There is no way to like violent pulp and not like Stephen Hunter's books. These are guys' books if there ever was such a genre. Unlike Tom Clancy, the king of the guys' book, Hunter does not shy away from extremes. His heroes are a little deeper than Clancy's chise-jawed stalwart. The Swaggers et al are very matter-of fact about killing and Hunter is in no way ashamed. Much like Dennis Lehane (whose SHUTTER ISLAND I will look at shortly) he writes his protagonists as tortured with guilt and old sufferings. It is an easy way to get the reader on the side of the man who is going to kill more than a few bad guys before the novel ends.

Hot Springs is neither Hunter's best or worst book, it is simply typical. His hero is Earl Swagger, the father of the hero of a couple of his other books, Bobby Lee Swagger. He is war-hero still haunted by his abusive childhood and his younger brother's suicide. He is requested to join the war against Owney Maddox (based on a real-life gangster who did, in fact, run Hot Springs, Arkansas after WWII, it's a name similar to "Owney Madden"). Needless, to say, the pages of the book start to smell like gunsmoke and sound like the tinkling of spent shell before you're halfway through. Swagger manages to have a fistfight with Bugsy Siegel, drink countless bottles of bourbon, and kill countless hillbillies as well as father Bobby Lee.

This book is not what I would call "quality fiction", it's sort a cross between Dirty Harry and Forrest Gump, now that I think of it. It is raw, violent, male-bravado pulp with no other merit than to keep you turning the pages, but it does its job very well.