Front&Centre Book Reviews

Reprinted from F&C #21

Down and Out on Murder Mile

By Tony O’Neill

Harper Perennial,

p. 256, $14.95

Review by Matthew Firth

The publication of Down and Out on Murder Mile marks a highpoint to be celebrated by the micro and small press faithful. Tony O’Neill has shot to the upper echelon of literary publishing with this book freshly out from HarperCollins, a giant in the business. O’Neill just a couple of years ago was a Front&Centre contributor.

So what does this mean? Did O’Neill sell his soul to be corrupted by big-name publishing houses? Or is there something else going on here? Was O’Neill poached from the stable of small press bad-asses and thrust into the limelight to give street cred to HarperCollins? There’s only one way for you to decide – read the book. In my opinion – Tony O’Neill has hit the big time because he is an excellent novelist, plain and simple.

Down and Out on Murder Mile marks a triumph because it would be easy to expect this book – a nasty tale of heroin abuse, violence, despair and glimmering redemption – to be marginalized to the usual unruly small press scene where a few hundred kindred spirits would read it and recognize its genius but then that would be it, the book would fade like so many other small press gems, buried under the tsunami of glittering airport pulp.

But like Bukowski, Selby and, yes, the original junkie-novel king William S. Burroughs before him, O’Neill has jammed his foot in the door of the big literary houses and is forcing his way in like a mad, gangbanging literary home invader. What’s most remarkable about this? Well, for one thing, I thought in these heady, corporate-controlled days – where big presses so often feed readers Pablum – a troublemaker like O’Neill would never crack this glass ceiling. Lovers of underground, salty literature should rejoice because this is not a sell-out by one of our own; it is a moral victory.

O’Neill’s new novel shows no puppetry behind the scenes. O’Neill has stuck to his guns, writing bold, honest fiction. Now it can be read by a huge audience, thereby, perhaps, paving the way for other underdogs to get their chance to propel literary madness and vitriol on unsuspecting readers.

Obviously, I would not rant this way if Down and Out on Murder Mile were not a superb piece of work. The novel plots the drug misadventures of its unnamed narrator from Los Angeles to London. With junkie wife Susan in tow, the narrator retreats to his native country for a new start, or, more accurately, an escape, after hitting rock bottom in LA when a police car runs him down on Christmas Eve while he’s out trawling for crack. But London does not save the couple. Not surprisingly drugs are easy to score in the British capital. The UK also offers the pair free access to methadone clinics via the National Health Service as a way to wean themselves from smack. But are they really interested in kicking? Meanwhile, Susan and her husband are chased from squalid flat to squalid flat, eventually landing in East London’s Upper Clapton Road, an area dubbed “Murder Mile” due to the high body count from a raging drug war. It’s not the sort of place to get clean. The narrator tries his hand at a few dubious jobs (magazine advertising hack; porn shop clerk) before gathering a bit of momentum back in the music biz, where, years earlier, he got his start as a fairly successful musician. But hold on – don’t those rock-n-roll types dabble in drugs now and again, you ask? Right – O’Neill’s protagonist steps from one hell into another. Again, it suggests he is not really that interested in getting off dope. Redemption does creep into the bleak narrative when a new woman (Vanessa) comes along and gives the narrator hope. But when you’re a hardcore junkie, and a professed lover of the high drugs bring, you don’t just walk away from it all because of a pretty face. It’s here O’Neill shows his brilliance – about 75 per cent of the way into the novel, he could have offered his narrator a sickly saccharine out where he and Vanessa live happily ever after. But that ain’t reality, my friend, especially for a junkie, and O’Neill knows it. So instead of a tidy, happy, mainstream ending – O’Neill gives readers a minor epiphany at best, as his narrator rights himself a little but he’s still a long way from going straight. The demons that have tormented him from page one of Down and Out on Murder Mile still nip at his heels when the book concludes.

O’Neill delivers this novel with energy, pace and blistering courage, pressing the reader’s face right into the narrator’s mire of druggie darkness. The novel is also non-judgemental. O’Neill shows readers the honest goods of a junkie’s life and makes no apologies for it. We are spared high-horse moralizing about drug use. Readers see the despair and must make up their own minds about the damaged lives O’Neill portrays. But with the damage comes some serious insider info and bias about the beauty of being high:

On the train I think that maybe right here, right now, I am the most beautiful man alive, because everyone is beautiful when they are high: I start to realize that the war on drugs is a war on beauty – a war on perfection, because everything is perfect on heroin – it is a war against the simple human aspiration of complete contentment, and the thought makes me sad – that we are waging such a pointless and spiteful war against the noblest part of our own nature.

This passage – and there are more like it – reveals O’Neill’s respect for his readers. He shows readers what being on junk is like, offers his views on the allure of smack and other drugs, while clearly portraying the anguish of addiction and the blinding madness of the all-consuming lifestyle but he does not preach about getting clean. In this era, when so many false prophets insist on telling others how to lead their lives, it is refreshing to come across a novelist who just lays it down cold and hard, letting the reader decide what he or she thinks.

Adding to the book’s strength is its artfulness, as the prose is very fluid. And there is humour throughout, bolstering the novel’s humanity. For example, when the protagonist is kept away from his pharmacy and his methadone because the cops have blocked off the street, he telephones the pharmacy, begging to get through and is put on hold. O’Neill describes it this way:

They placed me on hold. I found myself listening to Musak momentarily. Kenny G plays the hits of Celine Dion. I wondered if that would be playing when I die. The phone box stank of stale döner kebabs and vomit.

The narrator is jonesing here, yet he still manages to think about dying while being forced to listen to the world’s worst music. I had to laugh.

Tony O’Neill has delivered a powerful novel, more forceful even than his first landmark novel Digging the Vein from 2006. Murder Mile brims with vigour, violence, black humour and bleak humanity – you will love its honesty and directness above all else. Get out there and buy this book. Then you can say you read Down and Out on Murder Mile before the film comes out, if O’Neill’s ascension heads that way (a distinct possibility and wouldn’t it be ironic if Hollywood came courting, given LA is a fulcrum on which the heroin abuse in both of O’Neill’s novels is centred). If it goes this route, you smart folks can say you read O’Neill before the hubbub – back in his Front&Centre days.

 

Loners

By Mark SaFranko

Murder Slim Press,

p. 190, £9.95

Review by Bill Brown

There’s no mystery why Mark SaFranko’s work has appeared in places like Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Best American Mystery Stories. This is a writer who deals clues, manages pacing, establishes mood and character with a steady hand. With mystery being the air his stories breathe, they most often resolve themselves in unexpected ways.

In Loners, SaFranko is at his best in the kick-off story, “The Man in Unit 24.” Set in Lunenburg, NS, a menacing undercurrent is established early on. From page one something is off-kilter. Is the man in #24 the same as the one she caught a glimpse of on the TV? By story’s end, it hardly matters. Amy was running a motel into the ground by herself, after husband Lyle, a Vietnam draft dodger, didn’t come home one night. She’d let American family ties wither. Had taken up with a few drifters but mostly she had settled into masturbation and neglect. Set in an edge-of-town motel, Amy is as vulnerable as any of the loners in this collection. But when the dark stranger screws her, their “bestial silence” enhances a “razor-edged danger” she hadn’t known she’d been missing. Add in some nosy small-town folks, unhappy chambermaids and a local cop and you’ve got the classic ingredients for misunderstanding and misadventure. Amy, juiced as the story opens, has, by the time it ends, just changed fingers.

These eight stories centre around isolated (in two, living with a mother counts as the same thing) characters whose lives have gone from good to bad and are now on a trajectory towards various depths of hell: suicide, depression, abuse, murder and drink. If, in these starkly vivid tales, someone escapes one hell, it’s usually because they’ve turned a corner towards another. My only quibble lies with a couple of SaFranko’s stylistic tics: unnecessary detail that affects pacing and figurative language that occasionally skirts cliché (“… blush the colour of a red carnation.”) or the irritation of an inappropriate word (“… on the ridiculous expressway”).

Don’t have time to read? At least flip through the excellent and equally menacing artwork of Steven Hussy and Richard Watts. But whether you’re reading or flipping, do it under bright lights.

 

The Mountain Clinic

By Harold Hoefle

Oberon Press, p. 109, $18.95

Review by Lorie Boucher

I like short books. They say, “This is what I want to share. I’m not paid by the word. Trees don’t grow up dreaming of being pulped for my endless prattle.” Good short books are humble, focused and direct. Harold Hoefle’s first novel, The Mountain Clinic, is the perfect flyweight at just over 100 pages, and demonstrates an uncommon restraint and craftsmanship. Hoefle wouldn’t buy more words if they were on sale. My kind of writer.

The Mountain Clinic is a collection of six chapters in the life of Walter Schwende, whose Austrian-born father disappears from home in Scarborough, Ontario when he is seven years old. Over the next 30 years, Walter fills the absence with escapist adventure. He travels first to Vancouver, where he rooms with two Czech refugees whose wives left them once they reached Canada. After seven months, he’s had his fill and gets a security guard job at a mill up north where men go to “hide and heal.” Nicaragua calls him next, where Walter works at a coffee farm in an area under attack by the contras. At 37, we find Walter back in Canada, teaching at a Montreal high school, before he leaves on a trip to Austria to celebrate his grandfather’s 100th birthday.

His father’s disappearance is defining for Walter. “My father: I keep killing him, then I bring him back to life. Like the air in my lungs, it’s as if he always leaves but never leaves.” Walter was left and now he leaves, over and over, the places and people he meets in his wake. Unknowingly, he follows his father’s trajectory west and north, literally following in his footsteps, at a great distance. He fills in the blanks of his father’s life with his own imaginings, detailed accounts of what might have been. It is a restless, chronic search, and when it ends, the discovery is unsatisfying. It is very good stuff.

The father-son dynamic figures prominently throughout, of course, but Hoefle also gives us a window into men’s relationships with other men. Men’s friendships, jealousy, competitiveness over women and mockery thread the bits of Walter’s life together in the novel. In Nicaragua, Walter is an outsider whose norteamericano gastro-intestinal challenges are an easy target for his cohorts’ ridicule. “The soldiers imitated him, the quack that started the river out of his ass, and the way his butt coughed – like a tree frog or a sick machine-gun.” The guy humour is elevated by the quality of the writing and it provides welcome respite from the low ache of loss that underscores the book.

The clarity and poignancy of Hoefle’s style is a treat to read. The Mountain Clinic is a strong contribution to a growing suite of great short Canadian books and a solid debut novel.

 

The White Road and Other Stories

By Tania Hershman

Salt Publishing, p. 136, £8.99

Review by Matthew Firth

It’s difficult to write a short story collection that has a particular allure these days. I don’t want to go into a rant as to why this is, necessarily, but let’s just say there are a lot of competently written short story collections out there that are, well, competently written but lacking when it comes to soul, energy and imagination. Tania Hershman’s The White Road and Other Stories is not lacking in these departments and is particularly well-fortified with imagination.

Hershman, obviously, draws on her own skills to summon imaginative plots but she also uses short statements and facts culled from scientific journals to inspire her stories. Roughly sixty per cent of the twenty-seven stories in her book are kick-started by a scientific observation, ranging from lightning strikes, to global warming, to sunspots, to disease. Hershman introduces the story with a short quote from, mostly, New Scientist. Hershman is a former science journalist, so she is making good use of that experience to help fuel her fiction.

The results work. Hershman’s stories – like the science inspiring many of them – are variable. For example, in “You’ll Know” a woman sacrifices her body parts to be granted approval to adopt a child, so desperate is she to be a mother. In “The Incredible Exploding Victor” a boy worries he will literally explode because his obsessive mother force-feeds him. Language and how it affects our sense of home and belonging is at the heart of the story “Express”. “Evie and the Arfids” is a disturbing tale about using tracking devices on humans. And “The White Road” centres on a woman who operates an imaginary café in Antarctica. She went to the bottom of the world to start a new life, trying to leave behind a tragic loss. Many of Hershman’s stories dwell on loss, despair, frailty and weakness – on the human drive to face these obstacles and overcome them or at least carry on living in their wake.

Hershman adds more variety by countering the science-inspired stories with flash fiction, most of it lighter, more humorous fare. “Heavy Bones”, for example, is a quick, amusing look about reversing roles on a wedding night tradition.

The White Road may not be hard-hitting short fiction but it shows there is more than one way for writers to separate their work from the pack of safe and boring mainstream writing. Props to Hershman for showing readers that not all short fiction is dull and formulaic.