![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Title: The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death
Author: Charlie Huston
Genre: Comic Noir
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: Webster Goodhue is an asshole. He's got his reasons, but even his best friend has nearly had it with him. So he takes the only job that will have him--on a crime scene cleanup team. It's the second most horrifying thing he's ever had to do, but that's comforting in a way. Before he can get comfortable with the maggot-vacuuming, though, he finds himself in the middle of a war between rival trauma cleaners. And a femme fatale and her psychotic brother are dragging him deeper than he thought possible. And people keep punching him. A lot.
Thoughts: Ok, Mom and Mother-in-law, both of whom I know are reading this--I can't decide whether to recommend you read this book or not. Because I loved it, and it's possible you might also. Or you might just think I'm incredibly sick.
This book is hilarious. In a dark, dark, gross, and dark way. The narrator is a total and complete asshole and utterly dislikable to start, and yet you like him anyway because he's so totally honest in his dickishness. There's a remarkable amount of gore, which makes sense given what the dude does for a living, and yet it's played for comedy instead of horror or gross-out-ness. They clean up the apartment of a shut-in who had died and been found by the smell, and discover that the guy's toilet had clogged up and so he had started bagging his poop. The protagonist is hauling out garbage bags full of years' worth of individual baggies of shit. The surrealness hits the sarcasm fan, and then he gets beat up for his efforts. There are also bad, bad people in this book--not just jerks like Web, but people who will happily beat their family members to death with a phone to prove a point. Not the kind of people you want to face with nothing but slacker bravado, but face them Web does. Predictably enough, this gets him beat up as well.
This is the kind of world where Mexican restaurants are decorated with "one of the nicer bullfighters on black velvet I've come across" and the narrator complains "he may have said more nonsensical shit, but I was way too knocked out to hear it". Where he opts not to stab a bad guy in the ear with a plastic fork because he's afraid there's nothing in there to damage. The kind where the bad guys try to have a menacing phone conversation but keep misdialing and getting voicemail, where adorable small girls turn out to be bitchy little backstabbers, where the protagonist and his love interest have their meet-cute when he's trying to scrub her suicidal father's brains off the bathroom wall. (He'd shot himself in the bedroom. Turns out if you shoot yourself through a mouthful of water, the shockwaves help things, ah, spread.)
So do you think vacuuming maggot shells and brains is something to be avoided at all costs, or played for laughs? Because that pretty much determines what you'll think of this book.
(Oddly enough, it's also a touching story of redemption and friendship. Go figure.)
Author: Charlie Huston
Genre: Comic Noir
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: Webster Goodhue is an asshole. He's got his reasons, but even his best friend has nearly had it with him. So he takes the only job that will have him--on a crime scene cleanup team. It's the second most horrifying thing he's ever had to do, but that's comforting in a way. Before he can get comfortable with the maggot-vacuuming, though, he finds himself in the middle of a war between rival trauma cleaners. And a femme fatale and her psychotic brother are dragging him deeper than he thought possible. And people keep punching him. A lot.
Thoughts: Ok, Mom and Mother-in-law, both of whom I know are reading this--I can't decide whether to recommend you read this book or not. Because I loved it, and it's possible you might also. Or you might just think I'm incredibly sick.
This book is hilarious. In a dark, dark, gross, and dark way. The narrator is a total and complete asshole and utterly dislikable to start, and yet you like him anyway because he's so totally honest in his dickishness. There's a remarkable amount of gore, which makes sense given what the dude does for a living, and yet it's played for comedy instead of horror or gross-out-ness. They clean up the apartment of a shut-in who had died and been found by the smell, and discover that the guy's toilet had clogged up and so he had started bagging his poop. The protagonist is hauling out garbage bags full of years' worth of individual baggies of shit. The surrealness hits the sarcasm fan, and then he gets beat up for his efforts. There are also bad, bad people in this book--not just jerks like Web, but people who will happily beat their family members to death with a phone to prove a point. Not the kind of people you want to face with nothing but slacker bravado, but face them Web does. Predictably enough, this gets him beat up as well.
This is the kind of world where Mexican restaurants are decorated with "one of the nicer bullfighters on black velvet I've come across" and the narrator complains "he may have said more nonsensical shit, but I was way too knocked out to hear it". Where he opts not to stab a bad guy in the ear with a plastic fork because he's afraid there's nothing in there to damage. The kind where the bad guys try to have a menacing phone conversation but keep misdialing and getting voicemail, where adorable small girls turn out to be bitchy little backstabbers, where the protagonist and his love interest have their meet-cute when he's trying to scrub her suicidal father's brains off the bathroom wall. (He'd shot himself in the bedroom. Turns out if you shoot yourself through a mouthful of water, the shockwaves help things, ah, spread.)
So do you think vacuuming maggot shells and brains is something to be avoided at all costs, or played for laughs? Because that pretty much determines what you'll think of this book.
(Oddly enough, it's also a touching story of redemption and friendship. Go figure.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-02-12 04:14 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-02-12 04:34 pm (UTC)From:I think you might like it. But you have to promise me that if I loan it to you and you don't like it, you won't think I'm a terrible person for liking it and wonder where you went wrong.