The Animals After Midnight, Book Three in the Darby Holland Crime Series

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Every novel is an exploration of the psyche on some level. Some people say that isn’t so, but for me it is. In The Animals After Midnight, Darby has risen as high as he can in the food chain of Old Town. It cost him a great deal along the way, but in the end, the penalty for success comes from his past. There is unfortunate precedent here.

David Knoll was a pretty cool guy who lived down the street from a tattoo shop called The Hell Factory. I worked at HF and we became friends. He went from a guy with a little studio apartment, a futon, and a sharp leather coat to a guy with his dreams coming true over the course of two hard years. Dave busted ass, but the key to his success was a change of venue. He left all of his scummy dipshit New York pals behind and moved to a new town, where he could spread his wings and try to take flight without all those bricks weighing him down.

Flash forward one year. Dave has a bad break up. His new bar in Atlanta hits a snag when the building sells out from under him. His old friends from New York, cheering him from afar all this time, sweep in as he staggers punch drunk from misfortune, and they eat him alive. Then Dave is dead.

Around 3:00 AM, after the bars close and Old Town powers down, that was when I could sense it most. Change. The bad kind. The spirit of the city was a hobo’s garden, almost gone every second it was there, and Ming’s Shoe and Boot Repair was a hold out in the middle of it all like myself, a relic, too stubborn to move and too strange to understand it should change, so not long for a new world that kept getting newer. The old neon boot icon was set to slow blink and so was I. It was Wednesday. No matter how hard I tried, I wound up drinking in the alcove in front of it two or three times a week. Recently, more often.

A good guy I worked with for years, hard working family man, was headed for divorce. They had three kids and she was tired of him. It happens. This guy had collected a chorus of squeaky wheels over the years because you could count on him. Need a couple bucks? He’s your guy. Depressed? He’s your guy. But when his turn came, that chorus went silent. His psycho social support network failed to manifest and down, down, down he went. Now he’s a husk of what he was.

The list goes on.

I’ve seen versions of this play out time and again. For Darby, as a teenager he lived close to the edge, skirting homelessness, doing one petty crime after another to stay warm and eat. You make close friends when you’re desperate, but those same friends and family, later down the line, will view you as food. If you cross the line into prosperity, then family, friendship, even love, all of it breaks down if the ties were made from sorrow and shared fear.

Everything about the new, improved Lucky Supreme, that pinnacle of neon whorls and gold leaf, old fashioned barber chairs with polished chrome and speckled star field vinyl upholstery, the refurbished 50’s jukebox with bubbly lights and Cash Only, it was all my idea. My doing. I was rich after all, and we’d been rebuilding from scratch. There was some resistance at first. Delia had nit picked and micro managed everything, at every step, attempting to distort my vision through willpower, tantrums, and cold, bony shoulders, and some of her had ultimately crept into the place. But in the end, the blame for transforming a venerable tattoo shop in Old Town into a swank bordello tangled with a phony yuppie stereotype was my bad.

This has no doubt weighed on many people over the years. You second guess yourself because of it, just as Darby does. But he learns in the end that- no spoilers. I learned much about myself writing this book. If you read it, and I hope you do, consider. The antagonist is a common one. Made large here, but common enough. There is a Midnight Rider in your life somewhere. Because we all have one. In all of us there is also the will to be free. Persevere! And have fun while you do. Below, Darby is indulging in internal comedy. Give it a try!

Flaco’s squamous little hole in the wall had just opened. The smell of white onions and cologne wafted out, nauseating at the best of times, and the old man beamed at me and chortled in delight, knowing exactly what my morning had been like. Flaco’s Tacos had withstood the beautifying tides of Disneyfication with the same implacable gusto as the Rooster Rocket, but with different results. The signs, painted on old plywood, had somehow failed to take on a magical ‘antique’ or ‘authentic’ aura and instead remained boldly crappy. The white and yellow base was peeling around the edges where the wood had soaked through one too many times, and the scrawled, semi-literate descriptions of the food, all in Spanish, had been rain-blasted away in places and redone with Sharpie, also fading. The tiny stainless steel counter was bent and dented from a service life it had endured years before it was installed. Its time at Flaco’s had added an additional patina of scratches and dings and even a hole or two. The sticky bottles of hot sauce looked straight up evil. To top it all off, Flaco had taken to leaning out the window as he was now, and perhaps as a sorcerous talisman to ward off errant health inspectors because of the frozen dog situation, he’d added a hairnet to his ensemble.