This is it. The time where I reward the novel I loved the most in my 2011 year of reading. It's been a crazy year where I have read a lot more than usual, due to the surge of the eBook market and the success of Dead End Follies that made me a valuable option for reviews (by the way, this week of all weeks, has to be one of the most successful in the blog's history). Thank you so much to you, readers , for making this blog (and this award ceremony) such a tremendous success. Now, without waiting any further, Dead End Follies' novel of the year is...
CHOKE ON YOUR LIES by Anthony Neil Smith
Some of you might wince at this choice and I don't care. I chose to reward Smith with my most prestigious award for a very particular reason. Yeah, all of them could have won. Mailer, Nabokov or Fitzgerald, but here comes Smith, a unheralded writer who wrote a novel of comparable ambition, who flew completely under the radar.
CHOKE ON YOUR LIES has been marketed very quietly on the Amazon Kindle Store as a tribute to legendary P.I Nero Wolfe, adapted for the internet porn generation. There's a lot more to the bone than just a private eye novel here. It's a rabbit hole where the character that first seems grotesque and repulsive falls, to find out how abstract are concepts like ugliness and mediocrity. Filtered through the eyes of narrator Mick Thooft, the veil lifts more slowly for the client than for the sharp and iron-willed Octavia who does much of her jockeying off the page.
Smith's prose is flowing, respecting a logic that only he could work with but that makes his stories so much more vibrant. Smith's writing is transparent and often disappears behind the intensity of his dialogues. They are so direct and merciless that they often affected me physically while reading and it's the only novel who actually did this in 2011. CHOKE ON YOUR LIES has a gripping story, a unique, seamless prose and and the fierceness of a prowling tiger in its purpose. That's why I chose it for my novel of the year, because no other book this year has been such a complete, crushing attack on all my senses and my soul. Congratulations to Anthony Neil Smith!