Cry Father by Benjamin Whitmer
My rating: 4/5 cats
this is a really great literary foil to We Are Called to Rise. it is a different take on the same theme – that one act can have unexpected consequences and set off a chain reaction of events. but there’s none of the nicey-nice of w.a.c.t.r. here. in this book, when that act happens, you are fucked, brother.
here, you can rescue a naked woman tied up in a tweaker’s bathtub in the first scene and still somehow end up being the bad guy by the end of the book. or one of the bad guys, anyway.
this is the very grittiest of grit lit
Junior drools blood into the creek. The middle of the creek where he’s standing. He tries to spit, but he drools instead. Shards of tooth slip out over his swollen lip with the blood. The middle of a creek. He’s got the feeling he’s coming awake out of a very hard sleep. The tendons in his left arm sing a strained and painful note, and there’s a hard chord of nausea that cuts through him when he breathes.
It’s raining, he thinks very clearly. He can hear the raindrops pattering around him in the creek water. But he can also see the stars and moon spinning over him, tilt-a-whirling. And there are the lights of Denver, orange through the cottonwoods and creek willows. He touches his head and realizes it’s not rain at all he’s hearing. It’s blood, pouring from his head down into the black water.
he does a wonderful job with atmosphere:
The Bar Bar is the one bar in Denver that opens at six o’clock in the morning, which is just about the time Patterson pulls up. It’s a stucco box, right on the edge of downtown where the abandoned warehouses and gearhead mechanics take over. It’s never had any name that anyone knows of, but there’s a neon sign out front that says Bar, which is where people get Bar Bar from. From noon to close it’s populated by homeless cart pushers and bitter Indians, but at six o’clock in the morning you’re liable to see anybody. A high-end stripper killing the smell of baby oil and perfume with gin, a television lawyer blowing his last line of cocaine in the men’s room, an overtime cop pounding bourbon before heading home to his impending divorce. Anybody.
Patterson takes a stool next to Junior, who is sitting by a homeless man with a beardful of coagulated blood.
it’s not a book for everyone – there’s all sorts of casual racism, animal cruelty, hyperdrive violence – i can see why they got frank bill to blurb this. it’s tough stuff.
if The Ploughmen: A Novel is the daniel woodrell brand of grit lit where beautiful language and description offsets the horrific violence, Cry Father is more the frank bill version of grit lit, where the horrific violence is rolled around in with a grin and not offset by anything except more violence: ears torn off, dogs killed, fights aplenty…
that’s not to say this is without literary merit. it’s damn good and there are moments of quiet loveliness, but it is completely unrestrained, and never shies away from unpleasantness.
which for me, makes for a much more honest book than We Are Called to Rise
