Order WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN TO DUST here
''You ain't black and you ain't brown, but when I kill you right here in your shitty-ass apartment, nothing's gonna happen to me.''
Letting go of the idea that you are the center of the universe is a challenge to every human being. In fact, most people never do and end up dying alone and bitter. I haven't got passed acknowledging the issue myself. Author Barry Graham shows, in WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN TO DUST, a sense of perspective about the human condition that you don't come across all that often in fiction, let alone in everyday life. Don't let the frugal cover fool you into overlooking this novel. I might still be wrestling with the idea that the sun isn't going to expolode into a supernova when I'll die, but reading WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN TO DUST, I was washed over by a soothing feeling for a moment, catching a fleeting glimpse at my true place in the universe.
Laura Ponto's not happy about the impending parole of Frank Del Rio. She works as an investigator trying to find mitigating evidence in death penalty cases, yet she wouldn't mind seeing him strapped to the executioner's gurney. Both characters are terrified by Frank's upcoming parole for reasons that are their own, yet they find the courage to try and go on with their respective lives. Laura falls in love and finds the strength to make herself vulnerable to another human being, while Frank rediscovers a world he thought passed him by. Laura and Frank are bound by destiny, though. All these years ago, the choice he made to hurt Laura would start something that didn't have a good ending for anybody.
I know the word compassion might be alien to you, or synonymous of something bland and selfless, but Barry Graham has a keen understanding of its true meaning, and clever ways to display in in several passages of WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN TO DUST. People are complicated things that aren't defined by a single choice they make, but who keep defining themselves by choices they make everyday. Therefore judging them on a single choice is not only limiting them, but it's also limiting you. Barry Graham illustrates that point brilliantly and dramatically in the storyline of Frank, but also in a more quiet and subtle way through Laura's story. One of the hidden themes of WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN TO DUST is the complexity of human potential. It's a novel that's melancholic in surface, but compassionate and earnest beyond the surface.
Laura Ponto's not happy about the impending parole of Frank Del Rio. She works as an investigator trying to find mitigating evidence in death penalty cases, yet she wouldn't mind seeing him strapped to the executioner's gurney. Both characters are terrified by Frank's upcoming parole for reasons that are their own, yet they find the courage to try and go on with their respective lives. Laura falls in love and finds the strength to make herself vulnerable to another human being, while Frank rediscovers a world he thought passed him by. Laura and Frank are bound by destiny, though. All these years ago, the choice he made to hurt Laura would start something that didn't have a good ending for anybody.
I know the word compassion might be alien to you, or synonymous of something bland and selfless, but Barry Graham has a keen understanding of its true meaning, and clever ways to display in in several passages of WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN TO DUST. People are complicated things that aren't defined by a single choice they make, but who keep defining themselves by choices they make everyday. Therefore judging them on a single choice is not only limiting them, but it's also limiting you. Barry Graham illustrates that point brilliantly and dramatically in the storyline of Frank, but also in a more quiet and subtle way through Laura's story. One of the hidden themes of WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN TO DUST is the complexity of human potential. It's a novel that's melancholic in surface, but compassionate and earnest beyond the surface.
The first time Laura got drunk, she was seven years old. The beer was dark and heavy, and it was given to her by her father. Her parents had some friends over, and they found it funny to watch the little girl get more and more messed up, going from talking loquaciously through throwing up in the bathroom and passion out on the living room floor, while the party continued all around her.
Earlier in the evening, they had tried to get her stoned, but she thought smoking was gross, and she couldn't figure how to draw on the spliff once it was in her month. She liked beer - it tasted good, and it made her feel good, and even when she was puking in the toilet she still felt better than she felt most of the time.
I thought the structure of WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN TO DUST suffered from its overwhelming ambition, at times. The chapters are long and the novel covers a good part of the main protagonists' life. Sometimes, flashbacks are only announced by a page break, which can get confusing if you're into a reading groove and let your attention slip for half a second. For example, there is a long and winded passage about teenage Laura leading the debate team. While the passage has a clear endgame, I had to stop myself a couple of times to wonder what the fuck was I reading and how it tied into the main storyline of WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN TO DUST. I cared about the character already, but this passage went way too deep into a specific event, I thought. It's an ambitious novel indeed, one that has for goal to illustrate the complexity of human lives intertwined, but it comes with an amount of white noise and random variables that don't necessarily belong.
WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN TO DUST is part of a series called Phoenix Noir, based in the capital of Arizona. I would disagree that it qualifies as straight noir, though. It's more than just a noir novel, and it's also less, in the sense that it doesn't buy into easy noir tropes. I would call WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN TO DUST a contemporary tragedy in prose form, and a character-based and a minimalistic saga in the tradition of the early Haruki Murakami novels (you know, minus the flying unicorns and shit). WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN TO DUST presents itself as a melancholic and elegiac novel, but its got a couple layers of solid material under the varnish. It's a novel that mediates the cynicism of the internet age and illustrates all the beauty and the mystery of human relationships. All we have is each other and it's worth investing yourself no matter what.
WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN TO DUST is part of a series called Phoenix Noir, based in the capital of Arizona. I would disagree that it qualifies as straight noir, though. It's more than just a noir novel, and it's also less, in the sense that it doesn't buy into easy noir tropes. I would call WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN TO DUST a contemporary tragedy in prose form, and a character-based and a minimalistic saga in the tradition of the early Haruki Murakami novels (you know, minus the flying unicorns and shit). WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN TO DUST presents itself as a melancholic and elegiac novel, but its got a couple layers of solid material under the varnish. It's a novel that mediates the cynicism of the internet age and illustrates all the beauty and the mystery of human relationships. All we have is each other and it's worth investing yourself no matter what.