Review: Southern Sociopathic Murder with Laughs
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 4, 2013
This is a story about a loving young couple--murderers--and the private detective who tracks them down; all are sociopaths. The plot follows the usual path until the end (telling it would be a spoiler), with murder, investigation, chase, capture, escape, final confrontation, and conclusion. Along the way, we encounter various unusual and a few truly strange southern characters as the couple make love, get drunk, and behave in various unsavory ways while evading the law. Though the murders are senseless, the killers--Syd and Marcy--are sympathetic because they are in love, escaping bad personal circumstances, ignorant, harbor ridiculous ambitions, and lack conscience. Credit the author for creating such convincing yet improbable characters. The sympathetic sociopaths brought to mind Malick's film Badlands, and Capote's In Cold Blood and some of Jim Thompson's novels. The behavior of the young couple and the detective chasing them was often so outlandish I found it humorous. Why not? One reviewer called this novel a noir, which it may be, but it was never dreary, always highly entertaining.The writing is excellent. Glover writes energetic, direct, spare dialogue, without a wasted word, and his dialect comes across as genuine and differentiated by character. He can also write a fine lyrical passage such as this one: "They woke up one day to find the trees glowing silver with budding leaves and soon azaleas were lavishing pink flowers onto the world and dogwoods were screaming bright white all over town." How about this one, which describes the mental state of a man on a binge: "His synaptic circuits were burnt and the corpuscles in his nose were singed and throbbing and bursting drops of blood that fell down into his mouth or onto the mirror if he was leaning over it."Highly recommended.