by Jedidiah Ayres
Ransom Notes: The BN Mystery Blog
December 2011
I
love love love having a pile of books always waiting for me to read,
but with ever-dwindling time slots to devote to it, some of those
doorstop novels look like a month-long slog. Thank goodness for
novellas, I say. They’re a great shot of B12, (or pick a whiskey here if
you prefer that metaphor) to perk me up and keep me fresh for the big
project, cause nothing helps my reading rate like finishing books.
Here’s a few novellas I found to be just the thing for me in 2011.
By the Nails of the Warpriest and Old Ghosts by Nik Korpon. Korpon’s first novel Stay God was released last December and each of these novellas in 2011. Dude’s been busy, and I don’t mind. Nails is a speculative dystopian iller and Ghosts
is a tight little crime story of trouble not left far enough behind.
Both pack an impressive emotional punch so quick you won’t have time to
get your guard up.
California and Gun by Ray Banks.
Both have recently been made available as eBooks, which is good news for
Americans—cause this Brit Grit is too good not to spread. Gun is about a
low-level street criminal’s really bad day running an errand for his
boss and California is both the starting point and the destination for a
recently released con who wants to retrieve the loot he’s had stashed
and start a new life. Best laid plans, eh?
Come Closer by
Sara Gran. Strange things are going on with Amanda. Dark thoughts and
wild urges that seem entirely out of character are coming up with
increasing regularity. Is she losing her mind? Is she… possessed? Maybe
pushing the word-count of a novella, but certainly a one-sitting read.
One, very scary, tense read.
Every Shallow Cut by Tom
Piccirilli. The most startlingly complete and complex character study I
read this year was also one of the briefest. Piccirilli’s story of a man
riding the razor’s edge all the way across the country, after losing
his marriage, his home and his livelihood in one fell swoop. He loads up
his car with the last of his earthly possessions and hits the road
looking for his breaking point. Three travel days later in a pawn shop
outside Denver, he buys a gun.
Low Bite by Sin Soracco.
This tale of life behind bars in a women’s prison is raw and
unsentimental, but few books this year gave me as much pure pleasure. A
narrative thread about a scam and a murder emerges, but the real appeal
here is the anecdotal structure—all this color, humor and savagery
crammed into 130 pages? Yup.
A Moment of Doubt by Jim Nisbet.
This hot-shot of nasty riffs on writing, technology and sex focuses on a
parallel writer named Nisbet attempting to finish another one of his
detective Martin Windrow (The Damned Don’t Die) novels, hustle
the rent and use a computer program to formulate a best-seller. It’s all
over the place, but the Windrow segments are surprisingly tense (for a
semi-comic piece), the erotic passages are over the top and it’s all
rounded out with an unhealthy chunk of what I could only call retro-tech
porn.
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? By Horace McCoy.
As a man hears his death sentence read aloud by the judge, he tells us
his story in flashback—how he came to meet the girl, befriend her and
then kill her. The desperation oozes from every page of this
depression-era classic
Thirst by Andrei Gelasimov.
Kostya lost his face while he served as a tank crew-member in the
Chechen war. Now he’s a reclusive carpenter, rarely showing his face
outside of his apartment (except to scare the neighbor boy into going to
bed, now and then, as a favor to the child’s single mother), but when
his surviving comrades show up and drag him away to help them search for
another soldier who is missing, the trip offers new perspectives on his
past and new prospects for the future.
The Underbelly by Gary Phillips.
Magrady is a dispossessed Viet Nam vet down and out in Los Angeles
without a place in the world, but don’t think for a second that he’s
done fighting. When one of his friends becomes just another missing
person no one will miss, Magrady slips into combat mode for the concrete
jungle. Phillips’ style is an incendiary mix of blaxsploitation rhythms
and militant actions, it’s a hardboiled, hard-core street epic in a
single, sweet, chewable capsule.
The Wrong Thing by Barry Graham.
Speaking of an epic condensed, Graham sings the ballad of The Kid, a
criminal cipher of the urban Southwest underground, from birth to death,
with all the love, hate, crime and punishment in between in sparse,
elegant sentences that strip it to the bone, and completes the tale in
130 pages.
Back to Barry Graham’s Author Page | Back to Gary Phillip’s Author Page | Back to Sin Soracco’s Author Page | Back to Jim Nisbet’s Author Page
