Order BIG MARIA here
(also reviewed)
Order DOVE SEASON here
I am many things, but I am not a nostalgic person. I take little to no pleasure rewatching family movies from my childhood. Maybe it's because I didn't really care back then. High profile adventure movies have something emasculated about them, I find. They are idiosyncratic. They are supposed to fire up the imagination, but the viewer cannot insert himself in the narrative at any point. Author of DOVE SEASON and editor of BLOOD & TACOS Johnny Shaw obviously loves adventure stories. He also thinks about the same issues as I do and BIG MARIA is somewhat of an answer to neutered action/adventure. Shaw believes that crazy can happen to anybody and that makes for an entertaining novel.
Harry, Ricky and Frank are three losers. They don't have anything in common except that they are losers and they're sick of their situation. Harry happens to overhear a bar conversation of local legend Conspiracy Todd about long lost gold in the Imperial Valley. He decides to seize the opportunity and investigate further, but he doesn't have the resources to do this on his own. Therefore, he forms an unlikely alliance with Ricky and Frank to get to the bottom of this. Life is a complicated thing though and it won't like you trying to gamble your way out of your salary scale. It will throw everything at you: gangsters, greedy fools, abusive mother/daughters, even the motherfucking army, to keep you where it thinks you belong. BIG MARIA is how three losers decided to challenge the order of things.
What I liked best about BIG MARIA was its grownup take on adventure. Nobody is seeking adventure for the thrill of seeking adventure alone. It's nobody's job. The three protagonists of the novel are pushed to a desperate gold rush because their lives are falling apart. They are crumbling under the responsibilities of adulthood, so they respond by doing the wildest, most irresponsible thing ever. BIG MARIA is a triumph of the human soul over the crushing grind of adulthood. Johnny Shaw's deceptively complex and engrossing characters carry this novel further than its plot would've. It's another example in a long list that it's not what happens that really matters in good literature. It's who it happens to.
Flavia smiled. When Flavia smiled, she looked like the girl he had met. The girl who he had fallen in love with inside of a minute. Not the woman who worked too much. Not the woman who was tired all the time. But the woman who was the best mother in the world. The woman who stock with him no matter what, even when no matter what was a bad idea. When Flavia smiled, everything was right and good.
That said, BIG MARIA is very different from DOVE SEASON, which I was ''this close'' to go bonkers about. One simple factor explains the major difference in tone : it's narrated in third person, multiple protagonists oblige. I wouldn't begrudge an author for that and BIG MARIA is very good on its own, but Johnny Shaw is SO FREAKING GOOD at this first person thing, I had to go through a withdrawal period over the first hundred pages to adjust to this one. It has every variable that made DOVE SEASON so endearing to me, except that powerful, visceral feeling of intimacy Shaw conducted through his first person narration. I'm not sure if it would've worked that way, but I feel a little guilty to criticize BIG MARIA for something that actually NOT in the novel. DOVE SEASON was so well-told it made life unfair for its next of kin.
Several reviewers already stressed this, but Johnny Shaw is a strange hybrid between Elmore Leonard and Joe Lansdale, yet this comparison fails to do him justice. He is a master of the amateur sleuth and the ''Average Joe'' stories. He is one of the few authors with an actual voice. I could identify his writing without knowing it was he who wrote it. It's a gift and it often separates the men from the boys in genre fiction. I enjoyed BIG MARIA a lot. Maybe a little less than DOVE SEASON, but you can't hit a home run every time you step up to the plate. Sometimes you hit a double with 2 RBIs and it's still pretty damn effective if a little less spectacular. Johnny Shaw is the real deal. His books are not like anything you've read before.
