Anodyne
Friday, April 04, 2008
 

Recent reading. Smith's first book. Much better than Scream-meets-Little-Shop-of-Horrors, opening tonight at a multiplex near you. A competent ersatz Jim Thompson novel, well-paced and competently told. Four million dollars' worth of small bills leads first to one death, then another, and another. . . .I devour this kind of hubris-nemesis melodrama, and Smith's is a pretty good example of the genre, with its frequent wild shifts from spooky deadpan violence to black comic violence and back. If dour old Richard Bachman hadn't died of cancer of the pseudonym, he'd be writing books like Smith's.


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