THE RAGGED END OF NOWHERE is basically Las Vegas and the surrounding area, and author Roy Chaney does a workmanlike job of describing the austere beauty of the Nevadan hinterlands around Searchlight and Laughlin, and the garish neon excesses of Vegas itself.
That workmanlike quality is a slight problem in the first 50 pages or so of this debut crime novel. It starts off a little slow. But — and that’s a big but — it very quickly escalates into a rampaging thriller filled with gunfire, tough talk, nasty beatings and a plot that sounds a bit silly, but is all meticulously explained in what is reminiscent of one of those old hard-boiled cop and P.I. novels of the late 1960s.
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After reading Michael Adams’ recent, yearlong diary of bad-movie-watching, titled SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES, AND ASTRO ZOMBIES, I found that I enjoyed it, but not quite enough to keep it for posterity’s sake. My home office has an entire shelf devoted to books on less-than-stellar films that often are more entertaining than watching the flicks they discuss. Although mostly all out-of-print, the volumes below — in order indicative of nothing, once you get past the first one — are well worth owning for the connoisseur of cinema’s cheesiest. Happy hunting!
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While technically an anthology of LOVE AND ROCKETS stories, Gilbert Hernandez’s HIGH SOFT LISP actually adds up to a well-shaped whole, if a bit gelatinous at the seams.
Its primary subject is the smart, sexy Rosalba Martinez, better known as “Fritz,” because her father thought she looked like the cartoon character in Nancy. Fritz is many things: a student, a slut, a psychiatrist, an actress and a wife several times over. The one ex-husband who never got over her, one-time motivational speaker extraordinaire Mark Herrera, describes her in part by features from which the title has been derived.
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