I'm reading Savages now and am blown away. Power of the Dog -- the only DW I'd read so far -- didn't prepare me for such a fun, savvy rip of a book. He mixes a tight, fast, witty style to a depth of understanding about crime and criminals that nobody else can match, imho. He's like a jocular Ellroy -- every bit as twisted but he doesn't get sucked down the rabbit hole into total blackness. He understands that good may not win out always and forever but it doesn't get annihilated either, at the same time he so easily sees the duplicity in human nature in clear relief. The book is just an amazingly good time, and I don't want to do much else but read it.
This makes me blown away twice in just a week or so, because I read Jess Walter's The Zero over the July 4th vacation and found it staggering. Again, a great mix of tight, fast-paced prose mixed with wit and a savage understanding of human nature, but incredibly smart with a narrative conceit I've never seen before -- call it a reliably unreliable narrator. Kind of a Catch 22 for the war on terror.
Also reading a work of non-fiction that is so surreal, by necessity, it almost reads like fiction: Murder City, by Charles Bowden, about Ciudad Juarez. Reads like a poem about hell by somebody who managed to escape.
All 3 highly recommended.
David
www.davidcorbett.com
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