By C.S. DeWildt
128 pages
ISBN: 1508483817
(All Due Respect Books; February 13, 2015)
Ebook Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
ASIN: B00TLB35II
A peek into a lurid underworld of crooked cops,
Neil Chase is one of the most unique characters to inhabit a
recent crime novel: a hillbilly private eye equally at home huffing glue or
sipping shine, he exists in a nightmarish Southern Gothic milieu in which he finds
it easy to make “two enemies for every client he served.”
As Chase’s creator, C.S. DeWildt, puts it, the people in the
peeper’s home town, Brownsville, Kentucky, “weren’t swimming in cash and most
of them found Neil’s services could be done themselves for the price of a six
pack, a baseball bat and a shadow.”
Despite the scarcity of clients, Chase gets by, spending
roughly 22 of every 24 hours snooping in the affairs of his shitkicker
neighbors and struggling to come to terms with a life shaped by his abusive
father, violent upbringing and long-dead sweetheart.
In Love You to a Pulp, Chase is hired
by a local pharmacist who deals illicit OxyContin on the side. His assignment: finding
the druggist’s daughter, who has taken up with a local redneck.
The redneck
ends up dead – a not very convincing suicide – and the daughter disappears,
leading Neil into a lurid underworld of crooked cops, unethical lawyers, psychopathic
shitkickers and backwoods succubae, all seeking dirty money – and often
following a twisted fantasy of revenge.
The path is violent, amoral and claustrophobic – literally,
since at one point, Chase is trapped with a pair of dead bodies in a riverside
cave populated by crickets, crawdads and other crawly critters.
“Neil woke in his bed and realized it was still made of
rock. He’d lost time, found only space and blackness. He began to hum for some
noise. He pushed hard against rock and his chest ached. He focused all energy
into the floor. If he could break it further, give him a few inches, just two,
he would be free. Free to what? Free to be lost in the blackness.”
In the fashion of good noir, the characters in this story
are doomed by their own greed, lust and lack of ethical underpinnings, even
Neil, whose backstory, in the form of flashbacks, is skillfully woven into the narrative
of his search for the missing girl. The
book plays out like Ross MacDonald with a drawl: key characters have intertwining histories and
illicit connections; sex is as much a weapon as a shotgun or a Army model Colt
automatic, and forced prostitution, incest and backwoods perversion are offered
as substitutes for love.
 |
| C.S.DeWildt: Every dollar you ever hold has blood in its very printing. Just not everybody gets a posse for their trouble. |
In some passages, DeWildt, author of Candy and Cigarettes and
a contributor to such e-pulp publications as Out of the Gutter and All
Due Respect, emulates the hallucinatory nature of a huffer’s high,
spinning out scenes that seem to be experienced through a glue-sniffer’s eyes
and ears.
In others, he achieves a lyricism rarely seen in genre
fiction. At one point, for example, Neil is listening to a radio while he and
his father, Lester, wait for a client to finish having commercial sex with Neil’s
mother, a local prostitute.
“The radio was broken and trapped in AM mode. Stuck in the
cassette deck was a dubbed copy of Dark Side of the Moon, magnetic tape
snapped long ago after hundreds of plays. Neil spun the dial, caught bits of
fire and brimstone, oldies crackling with static, farm reports. Finally his
daddy turned off the radio without a word and the two sat in silence, eyes on
the brick façade and the dim window on the third floor.”
DeWildt evokes one of the young Neil’s hunting rambles with
a handful of well-chosen words:
“It was almost spite that kept Lester in the woods, and Neil
with him, following the tiny tracks in the mud and letting Jessup the broken
mutt flush them out of whatever patch of brush or cane they were hiding in,
back to the river where Lester would pop off shots with the twenty-two until
the water had sprung a red leak.”
“ ‘Vermin,’ Lester would say. ‘They’d kill you if they had
the sense. Don’t feel nothin’ for them.’ ”
Similarly, in another passage, DeWildt conjures the solitary
Neil’s wait for his father to return to the shotgun shack they share:
“Neil would sit in the garage with Jessup and pick the ticks
from the dog’s ears and neck and legs, crushing each of the flattened suckers
and trying to be the killer he wanted to be, while at the same time feeling a
spiritual prod, the need to offer up the ticks in sacrificial tribute to the
animals his daddy had killed. He lit a small fire in a coffee can and dropped
the ticks into the flame one after the other. They popped like corn kernels as
their insides boiled to steam heat that cracked their hard, shining skeletons.”
As Neil’s search continues, the bodies pile up like cords of
firewood alongside a cabin in the forest.
The trail, torturous and brutal,
always seems to lead back to the same things: jealousy, greed – and dirty money,
cash as toxic and addictive as the illicit drugs sold by the crooked pharmacist.
DeWildt doesn’t tell us this. He doesn’t have to. Neil’s
father underscores the point by telling him the story of Henry McGrath, a figure
from Brownsville’s past who traded his wife to other men in payment for some
unnamed illegal activity. The woman was
forced to service the men sexually while her son, still at breast, looked on.
“Now I don’t know,” Daddy said, “what caused McGrath to be
the way he was, the kind of man he was. But it ain’t worth debating the natural
versus unnatural. What is in nature is of nature. . .”
“What happened to the boy?” Neil said.
Lester crushed the
cigarette between thumb and finger with a calloused hiss. He dropped the
remainder in to his shirt pocket. “Died,” the man said. “Swept away down the
river. His mama too.”
“And the men?”
“Dead. Shot by the law. For thieving.”
“That’s where the money came from? They stole it?”
“It’s all stolen from somewhere,” Lester tells him. “Every dollar
you ever hold has blood in its very printing. Just not everybody gets a posse
for their trouble.”
