Review: A twisted tale of revenge, guilt, and bears
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 10, 2014
A trio of men drive through some isolated woods with a fourth men bound and gagged in their backseat. So begins Hammurabi Road, Steve Vernon's outstanding novella about revenge, nature, guilt, and so much more. Vernon kicks off the story with a fantastic voice that brings out an appealing, surprisingly comic accent to the proceedings, but it doesn't take long for the tale to spiral into something far more complicated than you might originally expect. By the end, the story's managed to involve everything from wild bears to a most surprising method of paying for your sins, and it's all handled beautifully - it manages to be funny, exciting, unnerving, and unexpectedly moving in a very unique way. Hammurabi Road is a great piece of short fiction, one that wears its length perfectly and uses it to tell a revenge story that's unlike most that I've ever read. There's no easy moral here, no simple platitudes about the cost of revenge; instead, you have something more visceral, more primal, and more human than such stories often manage to be. It's like some glorious blend of Elmore Leonard and Joe Lansdale, and that's no small praise. Between this and Sudden Death Overtime, I'm a fan of Steve Vernon's work - here's hoping he's got a lot more tales to tell.