RARA-AVIS: shooting horses and thieves

From: Robison Michael R CNIN ( Robison_M@crane.navy.mil)
Date: 16 May 2002


hi everybody!

well, i'm back from the big apple! didja miss me? yeah, right. hahaha.

i finished mccoy's _they shoot horses, don't they?_. i could not become interested in the plot (if there was one) or the characters. the girl spent the book doing a sylvia plath "i wish i were dead" routine and in the end he was dumb enough to ruin his life too by helping her out. (this is not a spoiler, incidentally. you know the ending at the very be- ginning.)

mccoy did do a good job of portraying the sense of desperation in the great depression, but i had just finished cain's _postman_, so that wasn't exactly new to me.

and i just finished up anderson's _thieves like us_. i liked it. good clean prose and excellent, well developed characters. he did a good job of getting inside bowie's head. the dialogue was excellent at portraying the characters. the relationship between keechie and bowie was well written.

my only disappointment (very slight) is that because i knew it was noir, i essentially knew the ending. like mrT recently stated, the genre is predictable.

shifting gears a bit: i got to thinking about that predictability factor and decided that's one of the reasons that harris's
_hannibal_ really rocked. a hardboiled gal like claris going over to the enemy camp is just unheard of. it shook the foundation. i'm glad they fixed it in the movie. ;-)

i just started fearing's _the big clock_. its pretty darned good, but nobody's dead yet.

miker

 

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