Order THE HARD BOUNCE here
''He's not gay; he just likes to fuck dead things''
Let me give you a peak into a mildly successful book reviewer's existence. I've ordered THE HARD BOUNCE, by Todd Robinson from Amazon last July, because it's difficult to find in Canadian book stores and I've meant to read it since forever. Given that it was a personal read, and that personal reads are lower in my review priority, it took me four and a half months to get to. What can I say? I didn't choose the book reviewer's life, the book reviewer's life chose me. Did THE HARD BOUNCE live up to over a year of anticipation? Yeah, it somewhat did. It's a fun novel that puts fresh faces on classic concepts and with a good understanding of what it is that makes hardboiled fiction so special. It was worh the wait, but don't be an idiot like me. Don't read it in two years, read it now.
Boo and Junior work security at The Cellar, a poplar venue in Boston's underworld. They also happen to take a couple private gigs on the side: tracking down bail jumpers, finding whoever's trying to law low, stuff lke that. When they are contacted by a mysterious client in order to track a teenage girl named Cassie, Boo takes a personal interest in the job. Haunted by a violent past of loss and struggle, he sees the wounded kid he once been in her, and the sister he's once had. But you can't get too personal in this line or work and not endanger the people who care about you and Boo's going to put them all in front of the bus, in order to find Cassie.
THE HARD BOUNCE is a straight hardboiled novel, in the most classic sense of the term. To be honest, I don't think it's a paragon of originality (you've all read/seen that story a couple times) but it's a novel that understands what it is and that's wicked good at it: it's a character-driven affair, with lean and mean dialogue and a dramatic structure built to keep you on your toes. Legendary author Joe R. Lansdale often uses the same story structure I call ''false endings'' where detectives actually solve the case and still have to deal with the backlash afterwards, keeping the reader on his toe about everybody's well-being until the very end. There were a couple great ''false endings'' in THE HARD BOUNCE, a bit like there was in COLD IN JULY. Maybe there was one too many though. The effect kind of wore down after a while.
In the seven years I fought in the wars of Camp Freshwood, three kids mysteriously drowned, countless others got bizarre food poisoning. One kid ''fell'' off a cliff, and another hung himelf with a macraméd noose. I shit you not.
But nothing compared with the summer Twitch vacationed at Camp Freshwood. Incidentally, it was the last summer of that ill-planned social experiment.
One thing that pleased me to no end was Todd Robinson's treatment of his own character's ambitions. Boo Malone's not exactly an anti-hero. He's a white knight in blue collar clothes, and I usually bear a murderous hatred for characters like him. Since Robinson is not devoured by his white knight ambitions himself, he build a tremendous support cast that keep Boo in check all the time. I loved Junior, his violent side-kick with a cold-blooded rationale. To me, Junior embodied the figure of the survivor a lot better than Boo did and I very much enjoyed the chapters where they got at each other's throat. I also loved Twitch a lot, and how Todd Robinson took his time to introduce him in order to have a maximum dramatic impact. He's the most interesting psychotic sidekick since the legendary Bubba Rogowski, in Dennis Lehane's Kenzie & Gennaro novels.
I like reading novels like THE HARD BOUNCE because they have clarity of purpose. It's easy for me to express my thoughts about it, tell you what I liked and disliked, because it has a distinctive personality. It is what it is: a hardboiled novel that doesn't aim to challenge the boundaries of the genre. What THE HARD BOUNCE had to offer is awesome characterization, wicked dialogue and an interesting take on the lost souls who feel the need to play heroes to redeem themselves. It was kind of refreshing, to tell you the truth, to read a novel that gladly played by the rules and that focused on mastering them. THE HARD BOUNCE has done more than enough to get me interested in a potential sequel.
Oh, and one last thing. this is for the people who already read the novel, wouldn't you like a short story/novella about what happened at Camp Freshwood? I would. Seemed like the kids had a good time there!
