Order MATADOR here
(also reviewed)
Order GUN here
Order WOLF TICKETS here
Order DEAD MONEY here
He looked up. Stars winked at him. He felt a chill. It was night, late, and the dead man was alive.
Every man I know (including myself) has (or had) fantasies of righteous revenge. It's a byproduct of testosterone, I believe. In order for you to attain a stage of acceptable righetousness, the enemy party has to cross the line and really hurt you. Trying to kill you or someone you love, for example, giving you a good reason to go to town on their faces. These fantasies probably don't take into account that you're the frustrated asshole who cannot cope with somebody else getting what you want, but they are so much fun. Ray Banks' novel MATADOR, first published as a Kindle serial in 2012, is like one of these ultraviolent, yet philosophical men fantasies materialized. I've been a Banks fan for a couple years now and I believe this is his best novel so far. I've read it in long binges, curled up in a ball on my couch until late at night for three straight nights. What does that say about me?
MATADOR begins with the protagonist clawing his way out of a shallow grave. It's a painful and terrifying process, the rain is pouring outside and he's confused and disoriented. He's got a bullet in the head, that he knows. He doesn't know anything else though, about life before this moment. About the kind of man he used to be. His only clue to unlocking the secret to his identity is a ticket to a bullfight in his pocket, with a phone number scrawled on it. Since the dead man doesn't have anything left to do but find out who he is, he calls the number and unleashes a series of events that will answer the questions he have. Will he like what he discovers? Sometimes, the biggest blessing one can be given is a clean slate, whether it's by choice, by luck or by force. What do you do with yourself after being shot in the head?
Catching the reader's attention with thirty-something awesomely written pages is not as hard as it seems. You need an initial idea, skill and preparation. Keeping a reader obsessively reading for over two hundred pages though, requires some thinking outside the box. MATADOR is an existential novel, but it's a crime novel, first and foremost. Ray Banks begins lifting the veil on a rather typical portrait, so typical that you can fill the blanks yourself, if you're an experienced crime reader. But what's fascinating about MATADOR is that the variables of the crime/mystery game keep changing as they appear. As soon as you're about to pigeonhole a character into a sterotype, Banks throws a curve ball at you that forces you to reevaluate the power flow chart of the entire novel. Not one character is exactly who his life dictates him to be and it makes MATADOR a lot of fun.
That said, MATADOR is a pretty masculine read. It tackles one of those ''male scenarios'' that rattles' men's reptilian brain and forces them into debate. These scenarios include: every result of a DEADLIEST WARRIOR episode, zombie apocalypse planning and revenge plans after surviving a bullet to the head. I'm sure I'd explain Josie how fun it is to plan such thing, she'd give me her notorious blank stare and say something like: ''Revenge from who? You work in a web marketing agency, Ben. No one wants to kill you. It's retarded.'' There is a part of every dude that clings on to his choices as the ultimate tool of his triump over his dark fate, and that made MATADOR a zesting read in that regard. It satisfied a deeply buried, adolescent need of witnessing a man triumph over the odds and raise above the mediocre ending that was planned for him.
I'm a Ray Banks fan. I've been for quite some time, now. MATADOR is the lost treasure of an criminaly underrated author. It has received unexplainably bad reviews on Amazon, which I believe are related to the complexity of the story and the serial delivery that had the readers confused. MATADOR is kind of complex, I've read it from cover to cover without having to wait for new deliveries and there are several characters, subtleties that can be felt from one chapter to another and details you need to keep track of. Don't let the bad reviews keep you from reading this amazing....*sigh* existential noir *sigh* novel. I know Ray Banks himself would wince at the pompous nomenclature, but MATADOR is the real thing. It's the novel many authors want to write, but can't. Read it. I'm sure it beats the hell out of whatever else you have to do right now.
BADASS