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THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH
by Charlie Huston
Ballantine, January 2009
336 pages
$25.00
ISBN: 034550111X


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Webster Fillmore Goodhue, a not-quite-thirty-year-old LA native, is suffering from PTSD. Not because of Iraq, mind you, but from exposure to one of the hazards of daily life in Los Angeles in the 21st century. As a result, he can no longer handle his elementary school job and has spent the last year slacking off, sponging on his tatooist friend Chev and trapped in an almost terminal case of irony.

But even Chev's tolerance has its limits and Web has to find some gainful employment. Enter Po Sin, proprietor of Clean Team, a firm that specializes in cleaning things up - messy suicides, decomposed and unlamented corpses, things like that. He offers Web a temporary gig and, to his surprise, Web realizes he has found his calling.

Called to the scene of an especially messy suicide, Web falls hard for the daughter of the house, Soledad Nye. When she later calls on him to clean up another mess, he gallops to the rescue and so embroils himself in a confused and violent series of events that brings him into contact with some exceptionally nasty individuals, many of whom seem bent on doing him harm and who are often very successful at it.

The characters all seem peculiarly damaged by their city of residence. Charlie Huston evidently feels that Hollywood films have a lot to answer for. Web's own father was once a successful screen writer and would take his son on alcohol bedimmed tours of some of the famous location shots in Hollywood screen history, places he claims that are a metaphor for the American dream. More dangerously, far too many of the low types that threaten to shorten Web's life seem to harbour the illusion that the film Pulp Fiction was in fact a documentary and have taken it as a model for how to behave.

What is genuinely striking about this book is Huston's facility with slacker speech, At moments of emotional stress, all syntax deserts them, yet they manage to communicate almost telepathically. Here's a sample; Web and Soledad are discussing their relationship:

"–Anyway, I'm in no shape to get into. Anything. Like. You know. I can't.

–Sure.

–But."

Though most of the characters have all the noir subtlety of Sin City, this hard-shelled novel has a soft, sweet centre. Searching for a measure of healing and to repair the damage done them by their parents and the world, the good characters struggle toward redemption.

There's a lot of buzz about THE MYSTIC ARTS and it's getting quite a launch, complete with a pre-publication review in the New York Times and several rave paragraphs from Stephen King on the Amazon site. I should be surprised if there is not a series in the making here. I myself prefer Nick Stone - he seems to be able to deal with the dark side more unblinkingly than Charlie Huston really wants to. All the same, he has found a way to cast a whole new generation into the noir genre and that can only be a good thing for its future.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, January 2009

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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