Last Days

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Brian Evenson
Underland Press, 2009

Detective Kline awakes one morning to find that a dapper pair of amputees have broken into his apartment. A crime has occurred at their compound and Kline is asked to investigate. What crime? They cannot say. Why do they  require him? Well, you see, he is an amputee too, and a famous one (if only among “The Brotherhood”). A “self-cauterizer,” Kline has achieved heroic status among the shifty mutilates who proceed to his kidnapping. Things begin creepy and become terrifying. As The Brotherhood shuttles Kline from gruesome meetings to gruesome ceremonies, the detective discovers he has been forcibly inducted into a mutilation cult, one in which the only way to rise in the ranks is to chop off increasing portions of yourself. Pure biblical literalism: If thy right eye offends thee…

A “one” on arrival (one chop: his hand), Kline can only escape the dark plans of the “tens” and “thirteens” by enacting the kind of gory revenge that will ultimately render him less human than his captors. (”A third part of himself, the part that terrified him the most, was saying What if Paul is right? What if I am God?”)

This is a nervy and squirm-inducing book. The prose is knowingly spare and Evanson’s got a sense of humor, a gallows patter:

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“I could count the number of people who self-cauterize on one finger of one hand,” said Ramse.

Dead End dvd “If he had a hand,” said Gous.

Hornblower: The Frogs and the Lobsters video “If I had a hand,” said Ramse.

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They drove for a while in silence.

Sniper dvd Ramse and Gous, Kline’s minders and companions, don’t so much resemble their famous R. & G. counterparts from Wittenberg as they do K.’s uncanny assistants in The Castle The Honeymooners divx . The story of a secretive brotherhood of amputees is rife with absurdities that can suddenly dart into cold horror (like the strip-tease; hint: she takes off more than her clothes), then pathos (over dinner: “‘I don’t have any hands,’ said Ramse. ‘You’ll have to feed me when you’re done’”). Evanson writes with a light touch and there are plenty of jokes he could have made but didn’t, plenty of scares and shocks he could have sprung instead of passing them over for others. The book is strong for his restraint.

Born of a literery mind, Last Days is a deliberate page-turner and Evanson’s prose is the opposite of ponderous. The sentences slip by and the action moves and moves. This is an easy book to read in a night; and needn’t be a moonless one. Moon or no moon, the room will be dark and your spine cold.

I’ve heard whispers implying Last Days Unrest download is a sort of metaphor for the Mormon Church. I don’t know enough about Mormonism to say, but The Brotherhood could stand in for most mystical and hierarchical groups (Scientologists, lifestyle junkies, The Fox Nation). I’m sure there’s more going on in Last Days than I was privy to and that’s just fine by me. I came to it looking for a quick and disturbing shocker. And it satisfied. That’s something real.

—John Cotter

Lowboy
By John Wray
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009

In a 2008 issue of Esquire, author John Wray commented, “You know, my dream, even when I started out, was to be to fiction something like Stanley Kubrick was to movies.” What he meant was that he wanted to be an artist whose work isn’t easily classified, but even so, there’s enough wrong with such an aspiration to make a reader wary when approaching Wray’s work. The author is nearly 40 but looks 20, and he came to writing only about ten years ago, after stints doing a great many other things; dilettantism is to be suspected.

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Still, his first book, The Right Hand of Sleep, was impeccably crafted, and although his second, Canaan’s Tongue, was perhaps more florid and less controlled than its author intended, it, too, was deeply memorable. Wray has a weakness for bagatelle plotting, but he takes a care with words that borders on the obsessive, and his imagery is surgically precise. He’s a slow, meticulous writer, and it shows in the work.

His third novel, Lowboy, is his best yet. It’s the story of young, off-his-meds William Heller, who’s escaped from the institute where he’s been committed and is hiding out on the New York City subway system he’s studied and loves. In his mind, he’s on a mission: to save the world from fiery destruction, he must have sex with a woman in the next ten hours. He’s being pursued by his mother and Dectective Lateef, both of whom are as complex and repressed as he is, although on the “normal” side of decorum. At one point Det. Lateef, the novel’s standout character, muses on the similarities between mother (“Everything she does is in spite of herself”) and son:

He remembered how the boy had looked running. From the back the resemblance to his mother had been absolute. He’d moved differently, of course – in a loose, disjointed way that called attention to his sickness – but that had only emphasized their sameness. His sickness somehow made him more like her. There was a mystery there that Lateef could not enter.

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Because young William (who’s either called “Lowboy” because of his love for the subway or because he gets “moody” – or perhaps neither reason) spends so much time underground, Lowboy brims with information about the New York transit system, but all of it is recast both by William’s paranoia and Wray’s masterfully sharpened outlook:

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The interior of the [subway] car was waterproof, the better to be hosed down in case of bloodshed. And the seats were arranged not for maximum efficiency, not to seat the greatest number of people comfortably and safely, but to express the designers’ fear with perfect clarity. No one sat with their back turned to anyone else.

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Lowboy

is told in a series of impressionistic flashes, most not more than a few paragraphs long, and it moves with extremely confident speed to its heart-wrenching conclusion. The book’s occasional tendencies toward predictable Hollywood formulae (Kubrick indeed) are more than offset by the understated brilliance of its narrative. Every one of the blowhards who used John Updike’s death as an occasion to wail “Where are our new great voices?” should read this book. And you should too.

–Steve Donoghue August the movie

Many of you may have noticed, piled on bookstore tables over the holiday season, the thick, pretty paperback of Modern Library’s Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen. Modern Library has done a wonderful production job on this book, which is Matthiessen’s long-contemplated recension of his three 1990s novels, Killing Mr. Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone. The main character here is the darkly complex and murderous early Everglades landowner Edgar Watson – a man with few charms, as Open Letters Fiction Editor Sam Sacks makes abundantly clear in his May 2008 review of Shadow Country:

Watson has no tragic dimensions because he has no particular noble qualities (his tenacity comes the closest) to balance his evils. His anger and passion are glandular, almost never righteous. He kills people when he knows the law will not bother him about it (Blacks, convicts, drifters), and in other cases he tricks stupid people into doing his work for him. The only lasting truth that Watson turns out to contain is that, in evil times a hardened thug can profit for a while.

That such evil times have compelled so much creative effort on his part doesn’t dismay Matthiessen. “It’s an unpleasant story, and it’s also a great story,” he’s said, “but we are a great and terrible nation.” To get a much fuller sense of that great and unpleasant story, click on over to the full review by Sam Sacks, and as we’ve urged you in the past: if you haven’t read anything by Peter Matthiessen yet, put him at the top of your list and acquaint yourself with one of America’s greatest living authors!