Book Notes: Dark, No Sugar—from Eli Cranor, Scott Phillips, Stuart Neville

These three crime novels are all from Soho Press: two from the Soho Crime imprint, and one from a new imprint called Hell's Hundred. Brace yourself. And note that the blue links are usually to reviews I've posted earlier, often on our Kingdom Books blog.

BROILER by Eli Cranor came out last week (July 2) so you may have missed it, considering the fireworks both physical and political. I reviewed Cranor's two earlier books, Don't Know Tough and Ozark Dogs, and this new one follows his curve toward increasingly bitter exposure of hard lives in Arkansas. Being ground down by circumstance, poverty, and the power of your boss is a classic situation that breeds thoughts of revenge. "Hardworking, undocumented employees" Gabriela Menchaca and Edwin Saucedo suffer some of life's terrible losses ... and that's before you add the horrors of their work at a chicken plant.

What they can't imagine is that the rich and powerful in their lives might also have wounds. And it takes the women to sort this out. There's a lot of "ugly" to wade through in this very new take on a kidnap crime -- but there's a lot of beauty, too, in Cranor's resolution of the hot mess.

THE DEVIL RAISES HIS OWN (August 6 release) is  Los Angeles noir at its richest and funniest, set in 1916 as photographers fumble with the new film technologies available—and the shocking delights of the mild porn called blue movies. Scott Phillips is known for his Midwestern noir but his 2020 That Left Turn at Albuquerque was already shifting the locale westward ... and isn't the classic noir often rooted i n LA?

When the photo would-be professionals cross paths with Bill Ogden and his studio, not to mention Bill's strong-willed granddaughter Flavia, complications multiply. Still, each of the men in this tangle has his own ways of keeping calm:

On the streetcar home from Pasadema Bill sat next to a handsome woman wearing spectacles, a basket full of vegetables at her feet. After a while she turned to him and spoke. "You hurting, mister?"

"What makes you say that?"

"You keep wincing."

He hadn't been aware of it. "I pulled a muscle in my back."

She looked him up and down, mouth pinched tight. "You look like a man's been up to some mischief. ... You have a look I recognize. A cheat. ... I can smell her eau de cologne on you. And I'll bet she's married, too, isn't she?"

Love noir, especially LA noir? Or dipping back into the start of the Golden Age of film? Pull this one onto your summer reading shelf and get ready for a lot of sneaky grins.

I would read almost anything by Belfast author Stuart Neville. His Belfast Noir books have been compelling, often threaded with the paranormal, and fisted with the generation-to-generation wounds and darkness of The Troubles. So I grabbed BLOOD LIKE MINE without realizing the shift of genre. It's quickly obvious: This is an all-American Western plus horror crossed into crime fiction, with that bloody tang of the Donner party in the background. (If you don't recall that from history class, take a moment to look at what took place back then.) It's compelling and gruesome ... and I hope that Neville isn't going to take this as an ongoing theme for a series about the historic burdens of growing up in the United States!

Almost anything else I could tell you about BLOOD LIKE MINE would be a spoiler -- you need to roll into it and figure out the twists as you go. I'll just tip my hat to Neville's unusual positioning of a mother and daughter and their very unusual motives for their Western journey. Shudder ....

The book's release (August 6) marks the second of the "Hell's Hundred" collection (it started in June with youthjuice by E.K. Sathue. Follow, pre-order, do all that important planning if the mingling of horror with crime and noir is your cup of ... certainly not tea!

A Vermont Halloween-Season Connection

Pumpkins are sprouting on doorsteps, silhouettes of witches dance in the breeze, and kids are intently trying on and reconsidering costumes -- it's almost Halloween.

For those attached to Vermont's history, it's also almost November 3: 89 years since the great flood that devastated so many of Vermont's roads, bridges, and homes in 1927. The flood damage lived well beyond the normal lifetime of such disasters, as it took root in the fertile imagination of a writer named Howard Phillips (H.P.) Lovecraft.  Lovecraft first visited the Green Mountains in 1928 at the invitation of his friend Vrest Orton, a prominent publisher and businessman (and founder of the Vermont Country Store).

To H.P. Lovecraft, Vermont was a wild place -- lovely, yes, but also with the potential for the dark, the frightening, the weird. He carried the scary side of his mixed impressions into his writing, creating a story called "The Whisperer in Darkness." We would now call the tale "speculative fiction" but for many years it was simply seen as horror: the genesis, in fact, of today's best horror writing.

Lovecraft's long career included many more brilliant stories, and he also served on the board of a "little literary magazine" of the period called Driftwind, where the publisher and editor in chief was Walter P. Coates of North Montpelier, Vermont. Issues of Driftwind that include Lovecraft's own writing, mostly poems, are treasured highly.

A collector of Lovecraft writings and related documents is allowing me to display today's images of the front and back of a postcard sent by Lovecraft to Coates, an amazing item that portrays the working relationship of the two men. Many thanks for the permission to show these.

[Transcription: Still on the move! Visited a week in North Wilbraham, + am now bound for the Mohawk Trail. I mean to see something of the country before I die! YrobtServt (Your obedient Servant) HPL] [Postmark date appears to be Oct 7 1928; the Mohawk Trail is a major road across northwestern Massachusetts.]

And if you have a Lovecraft reflection of your own, please share it in a comment on this piece.