This week, I review three books that left a profound impression on me – The Big Three – this past month. I devoured them and found them too nourishing not to share. Dig in.

To close it out, The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock.

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This week, I review three books that left a profound impression on me – The Big Three – this past month. I devoured them and found them too nourishing not to share. Dig in.

Today, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran.

Read the rest of the article »

This week, I review three books that left a profound impression on me – The Big Three – this past month. I devoured them and found them too nourishing not to share. Dig in.

First off, Fun & Games from Duane Swierzcynski.

Read the rest of the article »

Young Junius is not your son’s gangsta story. Seth Harwood tells the story of crack’s impact on Cambridge’s destitute Rindge Towers with Shakespeare’s sophisticated sensibilities. The events might be straight out of a DMX song, but they’re woven together by thoughtful plotting the summons the spirit of Hamlet.

The appeal of Young Junius is more than the symphonic skill Harwood composes the plot—it’s that indecision and regret are the demons that drive the piece. This renders the story with a core of realism while resonating with the kind of complexity found in classic literature. Hamlet could well be a distant cousin, with its large cast of haunted characters, its hand wringing and its cataclysmic collision of a climax.

The title character, Junius Posey, is fired up over the murder of a family member—his brother, Temple—and is looking to make someone pay. But just like the famous prince of Denmark, this young buck of Cambridge is unsure both how and who will bleed to balance the scales for Temple’s killing. With his charming companion, Elf, at his side, Junius wanders into the political power plays of a housing project crack war and becomes a pawn on a chessboard populated by similarly struggling characters.

In the parlance of the big-label rap that its dialogue resonates with, Seth Harwood’s Young Junius is more about falsing than about fronting. Most of its personalities are trying to act bigger than they are while figuring out who to be in the process. Harwood’s strength is in balancing the soul-searching with the pulse-pounding. He lures the reader into a page-turner of a plot and then slows his roll to give you a glimpse at the inner life of the warriors. The effect keeps you lashed to a mast in this crack-fueled storm—as soon as we catch our breath by visiting the mind of one of the characters, we’re propelled around another twist that demands we keep reading to see what happens.

Young Junius needs those kinds of hooks to secure the reader’s experience. It’s a vast work with a sprawling world of characters, all with different aims and fast trajectories. Without the plot sprinting and jogging, it could easily mire into a rogue’s gallery of character study. It doesn’t, and that’s why this work is proof of Harwood’s excellence—that he could take such a massive subject as the Rindge Towers on his shoulders and still manage to make our hearts race.

It should come as no surprise that a story of bloody vengeance in the slums is not for the cozy crowd. Any reader would be hard pressed not to find a poetic value in the souls and tender stories that inform the character’s lives, but we are here to witness those lives end in carnage. Still, I recommend it to any lover of crime fiction. Young Junius delivers epic scope and personal insight between the same covers. Outrageous as the slings and arrows of Rindge Towers’ fortune may be, their tragedy is rendered so skillfully that they deserve your audience.

My review of the Akashic Books short story collection, OC Noir, edited by Gary Phillips, is up at Spinetingler Magazine:

Orange County Noir edited by Gary Phillips: Orange County with Extra Pulp

By Matthew C. Funk

Orange County is the sick dog living off of Los Angeles County’s scraps, and Akashic Books’ OC Noir delivers that depraved desperation. This hardboiled bite of Orange County’s sprawl keeps its genre plotting consistent thanks to the accomplished instincts of editor, Gary Phillips. OC Noir has to leap from diverse ZIP codes—the immigrant-driven squalor of Santa Ana to the beachside sparkle of Dana Point—but Phillips makes sure the stories share the same pounding pulse and venomous blood. OC Noir manages to be as true to the genre as it is to the character of its neighborhoods.

Amazing as it is to find a genuine Russian restaurant and deli in Orange County, it is even more amazing that one as high-quality and affordable as Russian Gourmet at 22722 Lambert Street has set down roots.

Prepare to be amazed.

Russian Gourmet opened two weeks ago and is already drawing a loyal lunch crowd. It is a tidy location in a modest mini-mall, well-stocked with distinctive fare from Belarus to Siberia. Rare candies are shelved alongside spices labeled in Cyrillic. But the main attraction for the casual visitor or Russian connoisseur are its prepared dishes.

The menu is extensive and a la carte. This translates to exceptional prices, with entrees averaging a County-low $2.50 a plate. The quality is easily beyond that. Their first lunch special—the staple of Russian tables, borsch—is an exquisite balance of natural broth and abundant chunks of beets and meat. Served in a Styrofoam bowl, it is subtly spiced and amply filling.

I also sampled a pirozschk and found it to have top-tier sausage that revealed layers of flavor. The kebab was lamb of the best cut; savory and rich in taste while still being lean of fat. With both of these items winning high marks, I am sure to return to explore the rest of their menu. Vegetarian choices are not in short supply either, with egg-based pirogis in a variety of options and a selection of salads.

Russian Gourmet is an experience not to be missed—an affordable adventure into Eastern European cuisine for the dabbler and a vindication of trans-Volga delights for those accomplished in this rare and toothsome fare.

I conducted an interview with Jocelin Donahue, an Imperialist-era history scholar who just happens to be an Indy film star, lately lighting up the brooding frames of Ti West’s The House of the Devil.

Check it out here at the one, only, absolutely awesome Pretty-Scary, site of women in horror, by women in horror.

Jocelin Donahue is a thoughtful actress. Thoughtful films would be her genre: The former NYU Sociology-History undergrad has starred in period pieces like The Burrowers, a horror-western that was as much about settling the wilderness of the West as about what beasts lurk beneath that harsh terrain. She has been in abstracted short films like The Masquerade and Express 831. Sitting with me in a room at the Four Seasons, draped in the catalog-sharp attire that befits her past career as a model, Jocelin tells me she is drawn to acting because she is fascinated by the formation of identity.

I am back in the online word circuit. This blog will be used as billboard for what I’m up to. Political opinions may still soil the screen. If so, my apologies in advance. I will not be kind. The time for kindness ended when the greatest economic crisis of our age was answered by a pissing contest from all directions.

So what am I do? I take a page from our “Elected Representatives” and I, who cannot do, criticize.

I wrote this recent review of Jennifer’s Body, for my friend Heidi Martinuzzi’s take-no-prisoners, women-in-horror site, the incomparable “Pretty-Scary”:

I also reviewed the straight-to-video Infestation, one of the better survival horror comedies I’ve seen in awhile. Check it out on Pretty-Scary.

As for other projects … I’m certain to go back to politics eventually. For now, my analysis can be summed up neatly.

My future is less about macro-level misery: Watch this space for serial murder.