Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2013 November 1 • Friday

My friend James recommended this book to me. It's great.

It's as if Donald Westlake had written a Richard Stark stand-alone novel with a satirical edge, taking the Phil Ochs lyrics "I am a masculine American man / I kill, therefore I am" as a starting point.

The first line is great. Here it is along with the whole first paragraph.

This is what happened. Myself and four friends were hunting along the Sturrup River one weekend in the deer season. Around six o'clock on Sunday afternoon, just as we were starting to think about going back up to our lodge on Glass Hill and packing up and heading on home, we came to the riverbank at a point where the river is about fifty yards wide. When we got there we noticed that there was another party of hunters standing over on the opposite bank. There were either six or seven of them. They looked more or less the same as us—were dressed in camouflage the same as us and seemed to be about the same age as us. They didn't wave or anything when they saw us, so we didn't either. They just stood there looking across the river at us, and for a couple of minutes we just stood there looking back at them. Then, all of a sudden, without any warning, and I swear to God without the slightest provocation from us, one of them raised his rifle and fired at us, hitting Pete Rinaldi in the head. Pete fell down, clutching at his head, and at that point Zeke Springer, who was a superb marksman, raised his rifle and fired back once at them, hitting one of them in the face. We could see him throw his hands up to his face and spin around and fall down.

This escalates, as you might expect, but there are no further casualties on either side. The rest of the book is a build up to the next weekend, when these guys—all World War 2 veterans—go back, but in force, ready to resume this private war. In between there are brilliant portraits of the characters and their world, a dozen miniature dramas with dialogue that should appeal to admirers of George Higgins.

The structure of the book is simple but with just a couple of choice moves you might not expect. It's a very elegant, neat package for a story with a lot of messy and violent stuff in it.