Charlie Huston’s voice is a fairly unique one: His storytelling leans heavily on his ability to create compelling dialogue that actually sounds like two people having a conversation, rather than the author talking to himself. He dispenses with quotation marks altogether, instead introducing quotes with a carriage return and an em dash.
—Why does he do that?
—It lends some crackle to the dialogue, and creates a nice economy of words; eliminating “he said” or “he exclaimed as the icepick popped his eyeball,” and getting right to the action.
THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH is Huston’s best book yet.
Originally conceived as a slacker take on THE ROCKFORD FILES, MYSTIC ARTS’ main character/not-quite detective is Web Goodhue, a dude who’s down to his last friend and desperate enough to call his hippie mom for spending cash. He’s pretty much content to hide from his life, hanging out in his friend Chev’s tattoo parlor and being a complete dick to anyone who comes within range.
Pressured into taking a job with the guy who picks up the tattooist’s medical waste, Web is initiated into the world of “trauma cleaning,” going to scenes of ridiculously grisly deaths and crimes and using every trick in the book to make sure that the brains are totally off the drapes, the blood hasn’t clotted around the drains, and that there aren’t any pooled body fluids going rancid underneath the fridge. And Web likes it, which should be the first sign that there’s something wrong with him. He also gets pulled into a bit of a mystery, and while he does his best to avoid it, he gets pulled in (there’s a girl involved, of course) and see it through to the nastily stained conclusion.
The plot is solid and suitably twisty, but it’s nearly secondary to the exquisite craftsmanship Huston’s put in here. THE MYSTIC ARTS is a tone poem composed with entrails and regret. It’s told with the bare minimum of authorial exposition — the dialogue tells the story to the point that conversion into a screenplay wouldn’t be hard, if you could film a cleaning crew hauling industrial zipper bags full of human waste out of a dead hermit’s apartment and escape with an R.
Huston obviously relishes the disgusting aspects of the world, but it rarely is gratuitous. As Web passes each trial in the trauma cleaner’s initiation rites and helps the girl out of her jam, Huston also unravels bits and pieces of another, more crucial mystery: What the hell happened that made Web into this sorry asshole? This aspect of the story could have tended toward melodrama and cheesy theatrics, but doesn’t take it easy on Web; Huston makes his characters suffer before they get a denouement, small as it may be.
So MYSTIC ARTS should attract all types — it’s a great, noirish L.A. detective story; it has plenty of gross-out gore for people who go for the true crime/horror crowd; and it’s got some serious emotional weight, if that’s your particular fetish. But even those who don’t like any of that should give it a shot. Huston’s raw style is not to be missed here. —Ryun Patterson
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• ALREADY DEAD by Charlie Huston
• EVERY LAST DROP by Charlie Huston
• HALF THE BLOOD OF BROOKLYN by Charlie Huston
• NO DOMINION by Charlie Huston
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
I think it’s time to get rid of the em dashes for dialogue. A lot of authors seem to be doing that now, trying to be cool or different or something. As for eliminating the “he saids,” I’m for that whenever possible, but there’s nothing about quotation marks that means you have to stick in extra “he saids.”
I don’t think there’s a need to be absolutist about it–if it’s done well there’s no problem. Cormac McCarthy’s managed to eke out a living despite a totaly disdain for the quotation mark, and there are probably tens, if not dozens, of people who enjoy his books.
I’ve read books where this kind of experimentation is totally foiled by bad writing, but that’s a kind of literary Darwinism–if you write a book that nobody can make sense of, you probably won’t get many more chances to write a book.
Huston’s best book? I dunno. I still think The Shotgun Rule trumps everything he’s written. This one’s good tho. I bet he gives us a masterpiece in a couple of years.
Huston is one of those writers I’ve been meaning to get around to for a while, but there are lots of them and you know how that goes. But this got such great reviews I decided to take the plunge, and now reading the other eight Huston novels has shot to the top of my list. I always find myself irritated at first when a writer uses dashes in place of quotation marks, but after a few pages I get over it. The strangest thing about this novel is how fucking entertaining it is despite the fact that it’s not exactly eventful. Virtually nothing happens in the first half, and not all that much in the entire novel. Yet I found it just abut impossible to put down. A real treat and a great discovery.
I think there are a few Huston ebooks still being offered at Fictionwise and BooksOnBoard for free. I downloaded them a while ago–I’ll have to bump them up on the TBR list.
Yep, CAUGHT STEALING, SIX BAD THINGS, and A DANGEROUS MAN are all free on Fictionwise, and Stanza has a couple you can reap on the Ipod touch/iPhone, too. It’s too bad the first Joe Pitt casebook isn’t available as a free download–it would be a great lead-in to the whole awesome series.
Em dashes or not, I love Huston’s work. Anyway the em dashes aren’t that expeimental – they’ve been around for a while. Not so much in English fiction, but plenty of Latin American authors use them, from mainstream Mexican writer Fuentes to avant-garde ‘Boom’ writers like Argentinean Cortázar to on-the-edge writers like Cuban Pedro Juan Gutierrez. They definitely change the pacing up.
Oh BTW, two of the Joe Pitt casebook series (Already Dead, No Dominion) a r e available as audiobooks via newsgroups in alt.binaries.mp3.audiobooks. But your newsgroup server must have a save time > 99 days.