The Pile Jumpers: Edge of Dark Water by Joe R. Lansdale

I've been chewing through Joe R. Lansdale's back catalogue for a while now, and I try to read chronologically. However after reading this interview between Mr Lansdale and Mr Andrew Vachss I snuck over to the Kindle page for Edge of Dark Water and downloaded the sample. Just the beginning, just to see what it was like.

It was like, great.

The moment this book jumped my TBR pile was the moment the local sheriff shone his flashlight on the protagonist, a sixteen year old girl, and she described the light wandering over her body as feeling like a "hot yellow tongue". In the context of the scene--she'd just told us about her creepy, groping father who was standing nearby--it was a great simile. It hit a nerve, pushed a button, made me feel sick and interested. I can't say I hit 'Buy' right then and there--seduced or not, I'm not in a position to splash out seventeen bucks for an eBook that can't even be loaned on to friends--however I quickly ordered my local library to buy a paper copy and I sat on my hands til it arrived.



Quick plot overview: three teen protagonists, a rural setting, a mystery core (dead girl fished out of the water), a quest (to scatter her ashes in a better resting place), a road trip (by way of river raft). Adventure, injury and menace, death and dismemberment, and oh yeah, a big bag of stolen money. It's set in the Great Depression, which I didn't even realise until well past the halfway mark when the heroes ran into a band of Joads caravanning away from the dust bowl. The backwoods can be timeless like that.

Why did I love Edge of Dark Water so much? First of all, it's bleakly funny. There's a kind of wit that you usually only hear among people who are rural, indigenous, dirt poor, or a combination thereof... I guess you'd call it 'folkloric humour' (probably grown out of oral storytelling, if you want to get all anthropological about it). It's full of salty wisdom and sharp observations that can cut a person down to size; the sayings are utterly local, yet mysteriously global. This book is full of them, and it delighted me.

Edge of Dark Water doesn't fit any one genre. Thriller, crime, literary, horror, mystery, YA, I don't know. I can see Steinbeck in there, I can see Twain. I also see resonances with my beloved Night Of The Hunter: kids on the run with a big sack of other peoples' money, bad dudes hunting them, the seemingly endless search for refuge.

Mr Lansdale uses his story to talk about things that matter. There's a constant, dizzying shifting between kindness and cruelty in this book: the kindness of strangers, the cruelty of family, then vice versa, then back again.

I like the spiritual/religious dimension to the tale, the way the characters compulsively weigh their sins: I did something bad, but that guy did worse, does that redeem me? or I have a reason, is that an excuse? The darkest character of all, a feral river-man named Skunk, is supernaturally and mythically evil, yet he's revealed to be a 'hurt person who hurts people'... where does he fit on the karmic or heavenly spectrum?

All the while these big ideas are playing out, scary and grizzly stuff is happening and the characters are finding bravery and grim persistence they didn't know they possessed. They're spinning along the rough river getting hurt and hurting others, the pain and violence pushing them into new formations, into a kind of family.

I loved Edge of Dark Water and will undoubtedly read it again.

The Pile Jumpers: In Loco Parentis by Nigel Bird.

Mr Bird, I know you are a self-proclaimed "mostly nice guy" and have offered on your blog to send free copies of In Loco Parentis to those who want one, but I'm telling you here, do not give this book away. You've written something special and three bucks is an absolute steal.

The Kindle sample sucked me in right away. It's not the crash-bang action-packed opener I ask of my young screenwriting students. There's no clanking regional patois to suck in my primal pre-linguistic brain, like a riddle that needs answering. Just a conversational tone, a familiar setting seen from the other side of the desk, and a man to take us through it, a lonely and confused thirtysomething primary-school teacher named Joe Campion.

Teacher Noir is a great hook but this story's not really 'about' teaching. Joe does his job with integrity but I wouldn't say it's his vocation, it's just the place he goes every day, a place where he bumps up against bureaucracy and mediocrity, where he gets bitten by stimuli that set him reeling, spinning between homes, between peace and violence, between his laddish drug-loving youth and his crummy, lonely adult existence. Primary school is a great setting for a tale of personal downfall, the innocence of the kids a perfect offset for Joe's hopeless, buried rage.

The highest compliment I can pay In Loco Parentis is that it's instinctively written, and this makes sense because it's also the nature of Joe. He's a study in what happens if you do whatever you feel, whenever you feel it. This is how you shake up your boring life, folks, just put pleasure and the senses first and stuff all the rest.

I agree with the Amazon reviewer who said the manuscript was "stripped bare"; the red pen has been artfully applied and the story is stronger for it. I don't usually care for present tense narration, even less for tense-jumping between past and present, but it was a perfect choice for this book.

I loved the little wisps of paragraph, the short scenes that were woven together so intuitively. In Loco Parentis isn't a 'plotty' book, it's more like poetry (the fluid and easy spoken-word kind, street poetry, not the dense and inaccessible wordgames that fill the ruling-class anthologies). I think that's why it jumped my pile so easily; reading it was like falling into a moving river (yeah, if you've seen that episode of I Shouldn't Be Alive where the father and son are dragged along by their faces under an ice shelf!)

In the final chapters I began to anticipate 'dying like a dog' with Joe, as we did with Kafka's hero in The Trial (Joe Campion, Josef K? Coincidence?) and the feeling of dread was palpable. Mr Bird is a master, though, and every time you think you know where he's going, he listens to his artistic gut and eludes you again, leading you finally, heart in mouth, all the way to the End.

Get this book on Amazon.com or Amazon UK and plonk it right on top of your pile.

Here come the changes.

I know I'm not the only reader with a gigantic, festering, rapidly multiplying To Be Read pile.

Most of us place new books into a queue as we acquire them. If we pay attention, most of us probably already know which ones we'll get to soon and which we'll return to the library unopened--or shove onto a dusty bookshelf--with a guilty pat on the cover and a promise to return in a few months.

There's actually a lot of guilt involved in managing the TBR pile, especially for those who have friends' work waiting in there to be read and recommmended. However, sometimes a book comes along that just grabs you so hard that you forget the pile even exists. You sit down and you read the thing immediately, cover to cover, enjoying every moment.

Wouldn't you like to write that book? I sure as hell would.

I'd like to start a new post series here on the blog, and I'm calling it The Pile Jumpers. Not really reviews as such, just a bit of discussion about the books that have jumped my own TBR pile and a few thoughts as to why.

I'm also starting a post series dedicated to short story eBook collections. It's called Pick Of The Litter, and in it I'll share my thoughts on my favourite, standout short story within each collection. I'll start with the (mostly crime/noir) collections currently living in my Kindle, so that should see us through to summer.

Uh, that's the Southern Hemisphere summer...