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.

Small towns tend to breed big problems.

In my experience, no other active author captures the breadth and abysmal depth of this better than Donald Ray Pollock. The Devil All the Time is a grand narrative woven from sinews of wickedness from all stripe:

The pettiness. The psychosis. The craven desperation. These themes thrive in small town crime fiction because they’re fostered by the qualities of small town life. They can live in urban fiction, but cities are typified by their gloss and industry. Small towns are defined by their grit and isolation.

Each of Pollock’s characters is a vehicle for a distinct breed of madness. He includes the little tyrant in the form of the county Sheriff. Another character, lacking in means and hope in this world, tries to win assistance from the next world through crazed ritual. Yet another finds their pursuit of fame perverted into journeys of masturbatory murder.

The only lovely thing in The Devil All the Time is the writing. Pollock concentrates on menace over gore, focuses on the little treasures that give a life value and never paints in black and white. His characters are often vile, but their vileness is not broadly drawn. It is not unprecedented. And even though it is portrayed without apology or judgment, it is never done up ugly either.

This is just about the prettiest record of atrocity being printed today.

Dorothy Allison, of Bastard Out of Carolina and Trash comes to mind as Pollock’s closest literary cousin. Both treat their subjects with fascinating nuance and unflinching candor. Pollock excels at scope where Allison brings an agonizing personal depth. The Devil All the Time sets its diverse characters’ stories sailing from points all around small town experience, leading them along a grim journey until the soul-shaking climax.

It has it all: The enthralling descriptions and reflection. The corruption brewed to a boil by isolation. The expert crafting of divergent paths into a single course through the worst reaches of the heartland.

All it needs is your interest. And believe me, The Devil All the Time is worth it.

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.

If you know me through my writing—or know me well at all—you know I love New Orleans. I expected that I would love Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead for much that reason.

What I didn’t expect was to fall even more in love. I had to, though. Sara Gran has done more than write a damn good book about a damn great city. She crafted a love letter that showed New Orleans’ soul in all its resplendent romance.

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead illuminates New Orleans’ soul by revealing the essence of it — mystery and wonder.

It arranges this premise like a line of Tarot on a table: New Orleans is beauty and tragedy and wonder incarnate. New Orleans is, therefore, a mystery. And life is beauty, tragedy and wonder. And so life is a mystery. And so New Orleans is life.

This chain of meaning evokes the power of all mysticism: When the significance we find in the symbols around us are joined together — like a causality in a mystery — a greater significance is revealed.

And no doubt, as Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead states explicitly, I knew the solution to this mystery all along. After all, Funk fan, I write about New Orleans because I find it to be a pure microcosm of the human experience. I came to my conclusion about the greater meaning of Sara Gran’s book even before I opened its splendidly symbolic minimalist cover.

It makes it no less true. Here’s my proof:

In Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, Sara composes as complete a picture of New Orleans and its inhabitants as I’ve ever seen. The majesty is there, right next to the tawdriness. The brutality is paired with heartbreaking human beauty. Sara is conscientious about arranging a total view of the spiritual spectrum.

Don’t think this is orderly, though. Oh no. Like New Orleans — like life — it is a mess. There is a fabric of meaning to it, and it all ties together, but until the twists and turns of this symphonic plot sing to a close, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is spectacular madness. Everything is a mystery.

Did it keep me baffled until the end? No. But it’s not meant to. It wants the reader invested in their own intuition. It wants you to figure it out without truly figuring it out. It’s not about being a shocking who-done-it so much as it is revealing to the reader that our powers of deduction are mighty and precious and core to who we are.

So while it didn’t have me duped as to who done it, it had me deeply invested in the question of “why.”

Why did they do it? Why do any of these characters do what they do? Why is New Orleans the way it is?

It is as much about the why in oneself as it is about why of a crime, a city, a story.

And this is a message that’s dear to me. Just as New Orleans is dear to me. There is no better city for this story: A strange, little space filled with masks and ghosts and gang wars, majestically attired and threadbare, sad and celebratory and desperately proud.

If those qualities sound familiar, they should. They’re the cityscape of most people’s souls.

I love people because of these things. I love New Orleans because that’s place where they dance and fight without shame.

I loved Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead for getting that—for reminding me why.

First off, Fun & Games from Duane Swierzcynski.

I think about Duane Swierzcynski more than I probably should.

Duane’s one of the cutting-edge writers of my generation. He’s exploding across the major comic book imprints and at the visionary Mulholland Books publishing house. But there are a lot of authors out there that are rocking the world of crime fiction.

Why does Duane keep coming to my mind?

His new work, Fun & Games, has a lot to do with it. Since being introduced to Duane’s work by partner-in-crime-fiction and fellow miscreant, Jimmy Callaway, I’ve inhaled Duane’s writing—his work on Punisher, The Wheelman and The Blonde. And of those, I’d say Fun & Games is his best. It’s a hyper-adrenaline sprint through King-Hell plot twists that stuns you with how much substance he brings to character and setting.

And that’s why Duane pops up in my thoughts so much—his command of action in print is the best on the shelves and only getting better. When it comes to ink on paper, he is the Lord of Speed.

The page-turners, the cliffhangers, the punchy descriptions of ultra-violence—it all makes you wonder how he does it. Nobody else manages it like Duane. I don’t use the word “forte” all that much—it’s too high-falutin’—but in this case it applies.

Getting a reader to not just compulsively turn the pages, but to practically rip them aside to experience what Duane inflicts next, is his forte. It’s raw power. And Fun & Games is his finest piece of weaponry yet.

So when you’re a writer like me, you really wonder how Duane does it. You inspect his word choice. You scan the way they stack on the page. You size up the chapter breaks.

You dig into that wild mess like a Homicide detective surrounded by blood spatter and bullet casings, trying to figure how this top-velocity tragedy got pulled off.

Let’s look at Fun & Games as an example: It starts with hardcore tension—a young woman in mortal danger—action interwoven artfully with doses of reflection that not only let us know who this woman is, but make us care about her pain.

That’s textbook right there, baby. They say you have to grab your reader right out the gate. Duane’s made a firm fist: The girl. The mysterious past. The pain that opens our hearts up. The high-speed chase that aims a knife at them.

Then he follows it up with no less than three twists. That’s three times, in less than a dozen pages, that he blows your mind by switching this roller coaster onto a track that you didn’t even know would be there.

And all the while, Fun & Games’ prose keeps pounding away: Action, action, action, reflect. Action, action, action, reflect. Speed, speed, speed and then some substance where we mop our brows and clench our chests and learn another reason to care about these people in danger.

This last element is solid gold in Fun & Games. That’s a chief reason why I’d vouch for it being Duane’s blue ribbon example. In his prior works, many of the heroes were bastards. And I don’t mean “kind of bastards,” like they cut in line at Starbucks or talk too loud on their cell phones. I mean housewife-murdering, hardcore-criminal bastards.

Now, don’t get me wrong—those are my kinds of people. I’d rather read—and write—stories about the bad seeds and kicked dogs. But I’m not an example of the summer blockbuster crowd.

In Fun & Games, all the protagonists are good people. They’ve done bad things. They’re forced to do more of them. Awfulness abounds. All the same, these are heroes that anyone can root for.

Charlie Hardy, the central hero, deserves to win. That’s why, page after page, Duane gets you convinced that he won’t. And that’s why Charlie has a blockbuster trilogy ahead from Mulholland Books.

That’s why Duane comes to mind so often. Whenever another author asks me how they can pump up their prose into a page-turner, or whenever an action-thriller fan asks me what’s a must-read, or whenever my pulse gets racing, I think first of Duane.

I think of Fun & Games. It’s a thriller that will sear right through even a calloused attention. It’ll keep a veteran mystery reader marveling at the high-octane prose balance. It’s got heroes that even my aunt, bless her white-hat heart, would love.

Nobody builds roller coasters out of paper and ink like Duane Swierzcynski. Do yourself a favor and buy this E-Ticket ride.