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Death Will Have Your Eyes
David was one of an elite corps of spies trained during the Cold War. But those days are long gone and for nine years he has been an ordinary, upstanding citizen...until, that is, a phone call in the middle of the night awakens him. The only other survivor of that elite corps has gone rogue and David is being called in to stop him. An existential cat and mouse game played across the board of the American landscape ensues.
183 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1997
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492 people want to read
About the author
James Sallis
188 books396 followersJames Sallis (born 21 December 1944 in Helena, Arkansas) is an American crime writer, poet and musician, best known for his series of novels featuring the character Lew Griffin and set in New Orleans, and for his 2005 novel Drive, which was adapted into a 2011 film of the same name.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
April 3, 2017
Very similar in form and content to his later The Killer is Dying, this is both not particularly what I think of when somebody says "like Le Carre" (or The Coen Brothers for that matter) and not Sallis of the highest order, but still an enjoyable journey with a skilled craftsman about an ageing skilled craftsman.
November 7, 2013
After having read Drive and its underwhelming sequel Driven, I had come to think of James Sallis as a writer of sparse and short crime fiction who succeeded most in moments of violence or action. Death Will Have Your Eyes proves that impression incorrect. Whilst Sallis, in this earlier novel, still manages to engage in tense scenes, the novel is more a metaphysical examination of one's direction in life and identity through the guise of a spy thriller.
The plot itself is secondary and, unlike John le Carre's spy novels, it ends in a somewhat anticlimactic and redundant fashion. This is not at all to say it detracts from the enjoyment of the narrative, rather, the pleasure in reading it comes from these almost surreal character moments as David, traveling America in a vague search of a rogue agent, spends most of the novel thinking about his past and, in diners, bars and motel rooms, finding poignant connections with a cavalcade of strangers.
It is short enough to be read in few sittings and this is how I would recommend it. As Sallis intentionally misquotes Cesare Pavese, reading this instills in you some kind of mild "fever in my bones", wrapped up in an unreal world.
The plot itself is secondary and, unlike John le Carre's spy novels, it ends in a somewhat anticlimactic and redundant fashion. This is not at all to say it detracts from the enjoyment of the narrative, rather, the pleasure in reading it comes from these almost surreal character moments as David, traveling America in a vague search of a rogue agent, spends most of the novel thinking about his past and, in diners, bars and motel rooms, finding poignant connections with a cavalcade of strangers.
It is short enough to be read in few sittings and this is how I would recommend it. As Sallis intentionally misquotes Cesare Pavese, reading this instills in you some kind of mild "fever in my bones", wrapped up in an unreal world.
July 28, 2014
This was a weird reading experience, as if an insecure English professor were required to write noir, but felt compelled to pepper the whole thing with fancy allusions in order to prove that he was better than the task at hand. In its better passages, it reminded me of Le Carré's The Perfect Spy. It's more about impressions and aesthetics than plot.
December 5, 2009
Death will have your Eyes is a spy story, shadowy exploration of identity, and a road trip filled with perfect miniature descriptions of characters and places, sudden violence, eerie and surreal imagery, and melancholy. The plot is confusing and complex with shade like characters fading into each other (intentional I suspect). The back blurbs (by Moorcock and Lethem) compare it to Greene, Le Carre, and Borges (leaning strongest towards Borges) all of which I can concur with. Sallis writes nearly perfect books; poetic, existential, funny, cool, sinister, and beautiful.
January 25, 2010
It was an existential noir,spy story. I like how surreal,how poetic it was written like. It was different going from wondering about human condition to sudden violence in realistic spy way.
Characters,narrative wise not great as my first Sallis novel Drive though. Same different narrative there but more crisp,better character,story.
Characters,narrative wise not great as my first Sallis novel Drive though. Same different narrative there but more crisp,better character,story.
June 20, 2021
Typical Sallis Americana. The plot is even more aleatory than it usually is in a Sallis novel, which makes this one seem at times like the production of a tired man.
January 25, 2018
This book of prose had some spy story in it. The book's content had three main recurring events: sightseeing on a long roadtrip, flashbacks to memories and feelings along the way, fight scenes. These events occurred back and forth, both forward and backward in time. Existential reflections interspersed with present-day action make this book read like Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five". This is not to say I did not like aspects of the book. Sometimes his pretentious writing was clever in how he balanced omission of detail to tell parts of the story better than if he were to have directly described those scenes. By pretentious, I mean extravagant. If you are the type who likes wedding cakes because aesthetics are more important than taste, you will like this wordsmith. It is only after you are done reading the book that you realize how honest the reviews on the back are - the writing is what you come for when reading this book; the story is just there to give it a place to shine.
The story is of a retired spy almost getting back into the game, and then realizing that he is too old to actually do things that you might find in a good thriller. And the story reads as such. Actions scenes are sparse, with more content being devoted to drinking in bars and picking up women than dodging bullets and breaking necks. (Off the top of my head, he visits ~7 bars and sleeps with 3 women in the course of the book. There were 2 car action scenes and 4 fight scenes.) Most of the action must be inferred through these representative samples - if you are impressed with what he can pull off now, you can only imagine him to have been an absolute legend in his prime, which is actually mentioned throughout the story by others. His antagonists are often likened by him and his colleagues as being amateurs and small fry by way of skill comparison. As such, enemies are usually very quickly disposed of. His main spy contact acts like a deus ex machina - he only has to call his contact and his current problems are literally solved within the hour. He talks a lot about his thoughts and feelings and whether his life has been a waste and if it's possible to remove himself from his past...
The story was difficult to follow, amidst all of the existential meanderings. While said meanderings added little content, it helped develop the character and really "put yourself in his shoes". However, having a good character with no story makes for a boring book (for me). The ending was surprising and unexpected, but a bit anticlimactic. However, if you made it that far in the book, the anticlimax should not be disappointing, or at the very least, not unexpected compared to everything else that's happened in the story.
If you liked "Slaughterhouse Five", you might like this book. However, I wholly enjoyed neither.
Good: style and descriptions
Bad: almost everything else
The story is of a retired spy almost getting back into the game, and then realizing that he is too old to actually do things that you might find in a good thriller. And the story reads as such. Actions scenes are sparse, with more content being devoted to drinking in bars and picking up women than dodging bullets and breaking necks. (Off the top of my head, he visits ~7 bars and sleeps with 3 women in the course of the book. There were 2 car action scenes and 4 fight scenes.) Most of the action must be inferred through these representative samples - if you are impressed with what he can pull off now, you can only imagine him to have been an absolute legend in his prime, which is actually mentioned throughout the story by others. His antagonists are often likened by him and his colleagues as being amateurs and small fry by way of skill comparison. As such, enemies are usually very quickly disposed of. His main spy contact acts like a deus ex machina - he only has to call his contact and his current problems are literally solved within the hour. He talks a lot about his thoughts and feelings and whether his life has been a waste and if it's possible to remove himself from his past...
The story was difficult to follow, amidst all of the existential meanderings. While said meanderings added little content, it helped develop the character and really "put yourself in his shoes". However, having a good character with no story makes for a boring book (for me). The ending was surprising and unexpected, but a bit anticlimactic. However, if you made it that far in the book, the anticlimax should not be disappointing, or at the very least, not unexpected compared to everything else that's happened in the story.
If you liked "Slaughterhouse Five", you might like this book. However, I wholly enjoyed neither.
Good: style and descriptions
Bad: almost everything else
November 6, 2025
It’s been nine years without spying. “For many years, longer than I wanted to think about, I had lived on the edge, at the verge. I was good at what I did: fast when fast was needed, slow when that seemed to promise better results, always efficient, often surprising in my solutions both to the original problem and those inevitably developing from it.”
But one day in “Salvador” (no San or El), things changed for David. He “stepped through an unseen door” and he decided to stop. And he’s spent the last nine years turning himself into a human being, more artist/sculptor than international secret agent. The new gig was a challenge.
“At first it had been all form, just going through the motions, and I often felt like some alien creature painstakingly learning to pass, to give a good imitation of humanity. But in time, as it will, form became content.”
We are back in James Sallis country of self-discovery, identity, art, philosophy, and unique connections between a man and woman. For Lew Griffin, through six brilliant novels, the woman/muse was frequently LaVerne Adams or the British Nurse Vicky Herrington. For David in Death Will Have Your Eyes, it’s Gabrielle. And, when David gets summoned back for an unspecified mission and when he must reactive his old self, David must tell Gabrielle that she has no idea who he really is—that she has to pack up and get out. “In a week, a month, whenever I can, if I can, I’ll come and find you,” he tells her.
And then, at the very end of a very brisk Chapter 1, after Gabrielle has departed, Sallis gives us David saying goodbye to his art:
“At one end of the long room, by the windows, sat the piece I’d been working on, a forbidding mass of mixed materials—burlap, clay, metals, wood, paper—from which a shape struggled to release itself. You could feel the physicality, the sheer exertion, the intensity, of that struggle. I threw a tarp over it and as the tarp descended, the sculpture’s form, what I’d been seeking, what I’d been trying to uncover for so long, came to me all at once: suddenly I could see it.”
Death Will Have Your Eyes is a novel about a shape (David) struggling to release itself. And it is very much mixed materials—art, poetry, music, life. It’s a man pulling back on an old snakeskin that he’d long-ago shed, seeing how it feels, and reconsidering his old role in shaping the world order.
Note that Death Will Have Your Eyes has a subtitle and that is A Novel About Spies, emphasis on about in my mind. So if you were hoping for a slice out of the action-packed Bourne franchise, seek elsewhere.
Other reviewers have used the word autoscopic to describe Sallis’ works and that works pretty well here. I had to look it up. Autoscopic is an adjective that describes something related to autoscopy, “which is the experience of seeing a disembodied double of oneself from an external viewpoint.” It’s also a “type of hallucination.”
And much of the road trip that is Death Will Have Your Eyes has that flavor. Sure, if you know Sallis, it’s no surprise that the text is sprinkled with references to Rimbaud, Tom Waits, Homer, Archibald MacLeish, Talking Heads, Rabelais, Neruda, Neil Young, Mark Twain (on and on) as David makes his way around the country, chasing and being chased in a very loosely-defined mission. But there is often that feeling of David watching himself and, here, pondering the connection between his previous work (and its distant, covert political and military manipulations) and how it helped U.S. citizens remain oblivious.
“I was, I supposed, in the very heartland of America now, among people whose values, families and bottom-line way of life I had been protecting in all my years, in all my actions, with the agency. A quarrelsome dictator removed here, a cooperative military junta supplied with weapons there, an assassination or two. Eyes-only information passed along, overthrows, ‘tactical support.’ All so that (nominally, at least) these people could go on about their lives of Budweiser, proms, sitcoms, Saturday-night football and Sunday church. They’d never know about most of it, of course, and if they did, would never understand. One of the reasons—just one—that I felt terribly apart from them.”
We crisscross the country and even though David has referenced Kerouac, Sallis gives us the full-on On The Road echo, letting us know that this is a novel of a search for the meaning of freedom and for meaning among the mixed materials David encounters—the roads, the motels, the diners, and late-night television, too.
“I finally drove, through Montgomery and Mobile, alongside Biloxi and Gulfport and over the rim of Lake Pontchartrain, into New Orleans, arriving there after many hours and one terrible meal tasting indiscriminately of salt, stagnant oil and flour, amazed that Lee Raincrow’s decrepit VW had made it, at three in the morning.” Ah, echoes of the “rattle trap” Ford that takes Sal and Dean to Mexico and echoes of Kerouac’s prose as well.
And we can talk about Sallis’ easy, descriptive prose and how he brings a location to life? Check here he animates (at the last minute) one scene:
“The cabins were pure fifties postcard: fake frontier, as though some Titan’s idiot child had been given a set of Lincoln Logs for Christmas and turned loose, complete with brown plastic chimneys and slab doors painted to look like four planks with crossties. Inside, it was even worse. You could barely turn around in there without bumping into something; it was packed full with a green Naugahyde sofa and chair, a bed whose headboard put one in mind of numbness, matching blond dresser and bureau, a corner desk shelled with aqua Formica that after many years of bondage and struggle had almost succeeded in emancipating itself from the support brackets.”
See? There it is again—that motif of a shape struggling to release itself. Yes, there is a plot here. It’s loose. That’s fine. David, like Lew Griffin, would rather ponder his existence and what it’s meant than worry about his assignment. “Every day we reconstruct ourselves out of the salvage of our yesterdays.” First published in 1997, Death Will Have Your Eyes reminds us that the country is always changing. It hits home, with a bang, in 2025.
But one day in “Salvador” (no San or El), things changed for David. He “stepped through an unseen door” and he decided to stop. And he’s spent the last nine years turning himself into a human being, more artist/sculptor than international secret agent. The new gig was a challenge.
“At first it had been all form, just going through the motions, and I often felt like some alien creature painstakingly learning to pass, to give a good imitation of humanity. But in time, as it will, form became content.”
We are back in James Sallis country of self-discovery, identity, art, philosophy, and unique connections between a man and woman. For Lew Griffin, through six brilliant novels, the woman/muse was frequently LaVerne Adams or the British Nurse Vicky Herrington. For David in Death Will Have Your Eyes, it’s Gabrielle. And, when David gets summoned back for an unspecified mission and when he must reactive his old self, David must tell Gabrielle that she has no idea who he really is—that she has to pack up and get out. “In a week, a month, whenever I can, if I can, I’ll come and find you,” he tells her.
And then, at the very end of a very brisk Chapter 1, after Gabrielle has departed, Sallis gives us David saying goodbye to his art:
“At one end of the long room, by the windows, sat the piece I’d been working on, a forbidding mass of mixed materials—burlap, clay, metals, wood, paper—from which a shape struggled to release itself. You could feel the physicality, the sheer exertion, the intensity, of that struggle. I threw a tarp over it and as the tarp descended, the sculpture’s form, what I’d been seeking, what I’d been trying to uncover for so long, came to me all at once: suddenly I could see it.”
Death Will Have Your Eyes is a novel about a shape (David) struggling to release itself. And it is very much mixed materials—art, poetry, music, life. It’s a man pulling back on an old snakeskin that he’d long-ago shed, seeing how it feels, and reconsidering his old role in shaping the world order.
Note that Death Will Have Your Eyes has a subtitle and that is A Novel About Spies, emphasis on about in my mind. So if you were hoping for a slice out of the action-packed Bourne franchise, seek elsewhere.
Other reviewers have used the word autoscopic to describe Sallis’ works and that works pretty well here. I had to look it up. Autoscopic is an adjective that describes something related to autoscopy, “which is the experience of seeing a disembodied double of oneself from an external viewpoint.” It’s also a “type of hallucination.”
And much of the road trip that is Death Will Have Your Eyes has that flavor. Sure, if you know Sallis, it’s no surprise that the text is sprinkled with references to Rimbaud, Tom Waits, Homer, Archibald MacLeish, Talking Heads, Rabelais, Neruda, Neil Young, Mark Twain (on and on) as David makes his way around the country, chasing and being chased in a very loosely-defined mission. But there is often that feeling of David watching himself and, here, pondering the connection between his previous work (and its distant, covert political and military manipulations) and how it helped U.S. citizens remain oblivious.
“I was, I supposed, in the very heartland of America now, among people whose values, families and bottom-line way of life I had been protecting in all my years, in all my actions, with the agency. A quarrelsome dictator removed here, a cooperative military junta supplied with weapons there, an assassination or two. Eyes-only information passed along, overthrows, ‘tactical support.’ All so that (nominally, at least) these people could go on about their lives of Budweiser, proms, sitcoms, Saturday-night football and Sunday church. They’d never know about most of it, of course, and if they did, would never understand. One of the reasons—just one—that I felt terribly apart from them.”
We crisscross the country and even though David has referenced Kerouac, Sallis gives us the full-on On The Road echo, letting us know that this is a novel of a search for the meaning of freedom and for meaning among the mixed materials David encounters—the roads, the motels, the diners, and late-night television, too.
“I finally drove, through Montgomery and Mobile, alongside Biloxi and Gulfport and over the rim of Lake Pontchartrain, into New Orleans, arriving there after many hours and one terrible meal tasting indiscriminately of salt, stagnant oil and flour, amazed that Lee Raincrow’s decrepit VW had made it, at three in the morning.” Ah, echoes of the “rattle trap” Ford that takes Sal and Dean to Mexico and echoes of Kerouac’s prose as well.
And we can talk about Sallis’ easy, descriptive prose and how he brings a location to life? Check here he animates (at the last minute) one scene:
“The cabins were pure fifties postcard: fake frontier, as though some Titan’s idiot child had been given a set of Lincoln Logs for Christmas and turned loose, complete with brown plastic chimneys and slab doors painted to look like four planks with crossties. Inside, it was even worse. You could barely turn around in there without bumping into something; it was packed full with a green Naugahyde sofa and chair, a bed whose headboard put one in mind of numbness, matching blond dresser and bureau, a corner desk shelled with aqua Formica that after many years of bondage and struggle had almost succeeded in emancipating itself from the support brackets.”
See? There it is again—that motif of a shape struggling to release itself. Yes, there is a plot here. It’s loose. That’s fine. David, like Lew Griffin, would rather ponder his existence and what it’s meant than worry about his assignment. “Every day we reconstruct ourselves out of the salvage of our yesterdays.” First published in 1997, Death Will Have Your Eyes reminds us that the country is always changing. It hits home, with a bang, in 2025.
October 16, 2013
An existential, espionage, road novel. what's not to like? I love the way Sallis takes what would normally be a fast paced, join the dots, plot heavy thriller and sort of slows it right down and makes you notice what would normally be little more than set dressing. Chuck in a reactivated agent with artistic leanings and penchant for poetic reflection and the thrill is well and truly killed. As in other works of his there's a certain amount of serendipity that I might be unwilling to accept in the work of a lesser writer. Like reading a Jim Jarmusch film, which is a good thing.
October 28, 2024
Very quick "one last job" spy read that left me a little confounded. Would have preferred this at almost double the length, I think. I would cut about 20% of the scenes, double the length of half of the rest of them, and thoroughly expand-on/add another 5-6 events that only get a sentence or two.
You know how a TV show, like Game of Thrones, might cut to black right before a difficult/expensive-to-film scene, and then come back after someone was knocked out, and they open their eyes, and the battle is over? I feel like that happens at least a handful of times, and robs the reader of most of the excitement of the scene, depraves you of really getting to know and understand just how talented/efficient/skilled these guys really are. So much happens off the page!
So maybe, then, it's more about inner character, the ability to move out of the spy life, examining the possibility of reintegrating with the world? I think Sallis does aim for that, and he occasionally succeeds in some of the best chapters of the book, but overall it's pretty lacking in that department as well.
Decent book, but I wanted more!
You know how a TV show, like Game of Thrones, might cut to black right before a difficult/expensive-to-film scene, and then come back after someone was knocked out, and they open their eyes, and the battle is over? I feel like that happens at least a handful of times, and robs the reader of most of the excitement of the scene, depraves you of really getting to know and understand just how talented/efficient/skilled these guys really are. So much happens off the page!
So maybe, then, it's more about inner character, the ability to move out of the spy life, examining the possibility of reintegrating with the world? I think Sallis does aim for that, and he occasionally succeeds in some of the best chapters of the book, but overall it's pretty lacking in that department as well.
Decent book, but I wanted more!
February 12, 2020
Feels more like an alternate universe version of Sallis's Lew Griffin novels than a typical spy novel. The plot concerns a retired "spy" in the Jason Bourne mode getting pulled back into service when one of his old colleagues starts making waves. Our hero spends the book road-tripping from Washington to New Orleans meeting odd people and philosophizing to himself, waiting for something to happen. Sallis's applies the same rich prose stuffed with literary and musical references that he uses for the Griffin books, but the plot and main character don't feel like they can support it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 9, 2018
I started but could not finish this book. I could not make much sense of it. It seemed as if a retired tough guy beat up 2 guys who tried to rob him. This caused him to mysteriously know he had to go back to work. So, he starts traveling all over the place, meets other tough guys, and they, for no apparent reason, provide him clues to find other tough guys. So then I returned the book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 23, 2019
Some people will find this beautifully written; the author is clearly too classy for my liking.
I found it really dull and aimless: Slow storyline; very detailed descriptions of scenes throughout, setting the picture beautifully but leaving nothing to the imagination; and then a quite anticlimactic ending, but I didn't really care by that point.
I found it really dull and aimless: Slow storyline; very detailed descriptions of scenes throughout, setting the picture beautifully but leaving nothing to the imagination; and then a quite anticlimactic ending, but I didn't really care by that point.
July 20, 2020
This was a pretty good story about an introspective spy. Nothing much to it. No large conspiracy. The spies aren't all kung fu masters. Some are not well trained and screw ups. I enjoyed it. I'd maybe read something else by the dude. I just picked this one up because I saw it in the clearance bin. It would maybe make a decent meandering indie movie.
August 18, 2024
James Sallis versucht einen roadtrip thriller a la Kerouac oder Hunter S. Thompson zu schreiben, aber leider ist es nur ein minimaler Hauch davon. Sehr schwer zu folgen, oft irgendwie komplett zusammenhangslos und die Charaktere sowieso eher flach. Das einzige Positive was bleibt sind die Beschreibungen von Orten.
May 25, 2019
As always - a master writing wonderfully crafted prose. Sallis writes crime stories, in this case a spy story, to subtly and skilfully examine the human condition.
You will not be disappointed by any of his books.
You will not be disappointed by any of his books.
November 20, 2019
A "spy" thriller that's interesting more than it is thrilling. You never really know what's going on or why it's happening. Sallis writes well, but that doesn't mean to say this is successful. It's an interesting, readable failure.
July 15, 2018
A masterpiece of existential espionage noir, in outstanding language without a single word wasted.
Read
June 30, 2019Boomer faux-noir lyricism, not recommended
October 24, 2019
Surprisingly full of great prose, an interesting little mystery, and great pacing and action scenes. Short and sweet.
December 27, 2019
It was disjointed and had pacing issues.
April 14, 2020
Excellent existential spy novel really enjoyed this one.
February 16, 2021
great prose
November 1, 2023
A bunch of poetic nonsense with barely any plot to follow. If your looking for a thrilling spy story this is NOT it
August 2, 2024
this book took me so long to read because it was so doodoo. the main character talks about being a spy more than he does things being a spy. and the ending?? boooooo so boring
June 2, 2025
I dunno. I need to get into this detective stuff. The audiobook well read. Men being men.
June 19, 2025
The more I read this, the more and more I think this is my favourite Sallis book and by extension, one of my favourite books ever.
May 19, 2025
Tight and short but a touch too artsy for my tastes. Vague, disjointed pockets of story. Author also a poet, which is evident from its often flowery thought processes and difficult, patchy flow.
Read like a dreamy jack reacher, without much action. Lost track of meaning and story at times as he shot left right back and forth.
Ultimately a somewhat depressing journey around diners drive thrus and dives we've had force fed to us via US culture / propaganda.
I seem to be rejecting anything America after a life saturated by US cities and towns.
Give me Bob Shaw or Coney now I'm older. Glaswegian accents, Ramsay Campbell's dark Liverpool streets, Welsh coastal towns, Scandinavia, Africa, India, Canada, Russia.
I need a break from North American culture, especially 50s-90s. Rock n Roll can do one. Sure i'll be back for some Dick and Gibson one day, but definitely relishing the idea of a deliberate long break.
Was actually yearning for mcilvaney's glasgow from the second cup of stewed coffee and 'average-looking 30-50 yr old waitress'
Read like a dreamy jack reacher, without much action. Lost track of meaning and story at times as he shot left right back and forth.
Ultimately a somewhat depressing journey around diners drive thrus and dives we've had force fed to us via US culture / propaganda.
I seem to be rejecting anything America after a life saturated by US cities and towns.
Give me Bob Shaw or Coney now I'm older. Glaswegian accents, Ramsay Campbell's dark Liverpool streets, Welsh coastal towns, Scandinavia, Africa, India, Canada, Russia.
I need a break from North American culture, especially 50s-90s. Rock n Roll can do one. Sure i'll be back for some Dick and Gibson one day, but definitely relishing the idea of a deliberate long break.
Was actually yearning for mcilvaney's glasgow from the second cup of stewed coffee and 'average-looking 30-50 yr old waitress'
Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews