I haven't read The Vengeful Virgin yet, but I'm reading A
Taste For Sin, and it's got a protagonist who maimed his best
friend with a table saw after catching him with his wife, and
a teenage femme fatale who's got some pretty rough sexual
fantasies. The writing isn't spectacular, but it's solid, and
the characters are so crazy that it would be difficult not to
like it.
On 5/12/07, Dave Zeltserman <
dz@hardluckstories.com> wrote:
>
> What starts off as a kind of tired by-the-numbers
noir plot--lovers
> conspiring to kill an old man for his money, turns
into something
> very entertaining where just about everything that
can go wrong does--
> and the main protagonist, Jack, knows it's all going
wrong but is
> helpless to stop it. This was my first exposure to
Gil Brewer, and I
> almost put the book down several times before the
murder happened--
> mostly because the writing seemed flat and
uninspired. I stuck with
> it more out of curiosity whether it went anywhere.
Then a funny thing
> happened once the murders started--the writing got
crisper and truly
> inspired, reaching a David Goodis-type level. I
don't know whether
> Brewer was bored with the initial perfunctory story
setup--but to me
> it was night and day difference between the quality
of the writing.
> There's a scene after the murder where Jack is
visited and to some
> degree tormented by a doctor who sees through his
guilt, and the
> coolness and skill of the the writing matches
anything of Goodis's
> that I've read. The second half of this book is
really quite
> something--what's supposed to be an easy murder
turns into something
> nightmarish, and there's a lot of craziness that
follows. I'd almost
> recommend skipping the first 90 or so pages, but
what follows comes
> close to matching Jim Thompson's Savage Night and
Hell of a Woman in
> psychotic craziness. anyway, I'll be reading more
Brewer after this.
>
> --Dave Z.
>
>
>
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 12 May 2007 EDT