Rob Brunet's Blog, page 4

Reading "The Hunt"

John Miller puts on a terrific series of interviews as part of Exchanging Notes. They're insightful, occasionally irreverent, and always worth a listen. As a member of the Toronto Writers' Co-operative, I had an opportunity to read "The Hunt" as part of the warm-up act when John interviewed Douglas Gibson, considered by many to be a rock star of Canadian publishing.

The story wrote itself pretty much verbatim on a walk in the woods near my home. It was raining, but the tree cover in the ravine kept me dry, and I recorded the tale into my phone, as it came to me. It's a bit dark and is one of my personal favorites. At the reading, my own emotions caught me off guard when I hit the last couple pages, which made the experience all the more satisfying.

I'll be reading "The Ride" in the same venue a couple weeks from now and "Lucky for Me" at the library in The Junction in November. The details are here.

Joao and the cow

There's often a whiff of natural justice when a crime writer employs animals—wild or domestic—in a character's demise. Whether it's a gator scripted by Carl Hiaasen or a pig of Tim Dorsey's, the fauna are behaving as they should. The victims, not so much.

So why is it that in real life, it's the seemingly innocent who get flattened by random beasts?

Take poor Joao Maria de Souza. Lying there in his bed, next to his wife, fast asleep, and a cow falls through his roof.

© Kurt | Stock Free Images

Now, I am not bereft of feeling for this man's family, and from the look of his roof (the one with the cow-sized hole in it) he probably worked hard for everything he had. I'm sure he deserved a good night's sleep much as anybody.

But you gotta know this guy wound up with one of best bar stories in heaven. I can hear him now, "Yeah, really. Saint Peter couldn't believe it either."

Animals tend to show up a fair bit in my own fiction, and they're not always friendly. Or hungry. What they are, most of the time, is oblivious to the intentions of the human world they inhabit. They're just animals, doing what seems right to them at the moment.

Like "Rickie's Pig", or Hiaasen's gator, or just a squirrel looking for a warm place to sleep.

Or a cow out for a walk on some guy's roof.

 

THE HARD BOUNCE by Todd Robinson

Reading THE HARD BOUNCE is like perching yourself on the corner stool in an unfamiliar bar filled with habitués coughing up taut one-liners. To your right is the storyteller. He's got your ear and he's not letting go until his tale is done. You keep buying his drinks 'cause the story's that damn good. To your left, running down the wood to the door that swings open every chapter or two, are his pals (and worse) who chime in with colour commentary whenever the urge hits.

Your narrator is Boo Malone, a bouncer with a little extra on the ball, a healthy dose of insecurity, and an angry streak that blots out superficial pain. He tells the story straight. He has doubts when he and his partner get hired to find a runaway, but cash is king and how hard can it be to ferret out a rich kid among the street punks that hang near The Cellar? After all, Boston's "got a class line as sharp as a glass scalpel and wider than a sorority pledge's legs."

When the trail leads to a particularly brutal brand of sexual exploitation, you get as angry as Boo and nothing he metes out is going to feel wrong. Bad, yes, but hardly wrong.

THE HARD BOUNCE is a harshly good read. The nasty bits are never gratuitous and they're more than fodder for your vigilante bone. Todd Robinson peels back the curtain on multiple netherworlds and graces each with characters true to their ilk. Boo's own background allows him to reveal the humanity in even the worst of the scum he encounters. You raise a glass, offer a toast of good riddance, and read on.

The non-stop barroom humor is the perfect foil for the violence in Boo's story. In the middle of a brawl, he and his partner trade barbs about their masculinity and compare notes on the impact of homemade stun guns vs. getting hoofed in the gonads.

Like any good storyteller, Boo has you lapping it up, bitter bits and all, believing every word. He foreshadows some twists and delivers others like a sucker punch to the gut. He pulls back from the fire and sheds a tear with you, then wipes his nose, makes you laugh, and says, "And then there was Twitch." And you wanna know. You just gotta know what happens next.

This is not a run and chase 'em thriller. Sure, the movie they make from it will be edge-of-your-seat worthy. But what Robinson does is so much better than that. He tells his complex tale in the laconic voice of a man whose personal rage is held in by thick skin and scars. He lets his listener share in the bighearted tough guy reaction to the pain and detritis that surrounds him. It's hard to imagine how a different narrator could spin so dark a story with more empathy.

Boo, I mean Robinson, holds your ear right to the end. And leaves you thinking you you'll have to stop by this bar next time you're in town, buy him a few drinks, and ask what new story he's got to tell.

Got up on Shotgun Honey

 

Shotgun Honey offers up sharp objects three times a week. At 700-words or less, the stories are beyond compressed. They're tight, taught, honed, and hammered home.

 

Today, they ran one of mine, "Rickie's Pig". Puts me (and the hog) in good company.

And if that little ditty makes you crave a little more bacon, there's always this true life tale from a few months back.

Admittedly, I've got a thing for animals. Not pets. Just beasts with wrinkly skin, scales, fur and such.