This book is less than two hundred pages, so you can blow through it almost as quickly as the action happens. It's probably so short because the high energy would be impossible to sustain for much longer.

Jimmy Luntz, the protagonist, is almost likeable as a screw-up with a bad gambling debt and just enough dumb luck to get himself even deeper when he accidentally-on purpose shoots the guy who comes to beat him up when he can't pay. But he only shoots Gambol in the leg instead of killing him, and that makes it open season on him for every maladroit in a five-hundred mile radius, including Anita, who drinks far too much and while entangled in middle of a nasty divorce and an embezzling rap. She's the most pleasant character in the book, even if she does have the stupendously bad judgment to sleep with Jimmy.

Everyone in the book is violent, horny, crazy, or most of the above, and nobody really finishes well. Johnson's dialogue is brilliantly laconic and overblown at the same time, and scene after scene ends with a line I want to steal for my own. The black humor is like eating broken glass with a great cheeze dip. Logic sometimes takes a wrong turn in the name of another shooting or beating, too, but this isn't a book you're going to analyze in grad school. More's the pity.