Caught Stealing: A Novel
by Charlie Huston
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Book Reviews of Caught Stealing: A Novel
Book Review: Stealing Scuffs at the Line
Summary: 3 Stars
THREE-AND-A-HALF STARS
Ever find yourself asking where JUST ENOUGH turns into WAY TOO MUCH? I know I wonder where the line falls between an extra hour's sleep on Saturday and pure laziness, between adding an interesting side project and falling into scattered slothfulness. Usually, this behavioral platting occurs when I'm trying to rationalize something away, to say that, hey, no one can really tell when an action moves from mildly indulgent to flat-out grotesque. (Logicians call this the Fallacy of the Beard, but I prefer to call it the Fallacy of Utterly Consuming an Entire Tin of Christmas Toffee Piece by Tiny Piece, which I know nothing about personally.) Such suppositions aren't entirely indulgent. In fact, questions about when violence changes from intense to exploitative spring up quite naturally while reading Charlie Huston's Caught Stealing.
Hank Thompson hasn't led a successful life. As an athletic high schooler, he seemed destined for the pro-baseball diamond. But a (literal) bad break destroyed his athletic hopes and a freak car crash robbed him of both his best friend and sense of purpose. Now an amiable alcoholic with chronically aching feet and always teetering on the edge of insolvency, he tends bar in New York. That is until two Russian guys with tiny hands show up and completely spoil his day. Funny, with small hands like that you wouldn't think they could do much damage, but they beat Hank, beat him without a reason, beat him until his kidney ruptured. Now minus an internal organ, he's trying to figure what he could've possibly done. The only thing out of the ordinary is his friend Russ asking him to watch his cat. Russ, who was nervous and agitated when he banged on his door. Russ, who didn't seem to know when he'd be returning to town ...
You don't need clairvoyance to foresee that Caught Stealing will plunge Hank in over his head very quickly. What may surprise you, though, is the brutality of his travails. This isn't a book to read before bed or at mealtimes. It's a thriller with a noir heart and ice water sluicing through its veins. It reads like the lovechild of Adrian McKinty's stream-of-consciousness hardboiled and Scott Sigler's tartare-raw horror. It's the sort of book where needle-nosed pliers come none-too-gently in contact with surgical staples, where a friendly feline gets roughed up in ways I'm unwilling to commit to print.
So if the novel's that intense, why bother reading? Good question. Fortunately, Huston intersperses the explosions of violence with long periods of character-building detail, which are immensely effective at making you care for Hank and friends long before the baseball bats and brass knuckles come out. Also, the gritty bits are largely free of explicit detail, allowing your imagination to fill in the worst parts. No doubt Caught Stealing will make many squirm. But even though its starkness scuffs at the line of appropriateness here and there, its engaging narrative manages to make the violence secondary, which is right where it belongs.
Book Review: Will Leave The Reader Gasping For Air At Times!
Summary: 5 Stars
Charlie Huston is the real deal! If you have not yet discovered him and are attracted to dark, urban noirish, brutally violent novels, then run, don't walk, and secure a Charlie Huston novel. I have read all the Joe Pitt vampire series and have gone back to read the Hank Thompson trilogy which begins with "Caught Stealing." As I have said in previous reviews, Huston is not the easiest author to follow as he writes in a stream of consciousness prose style that does not include who is saying what nor does he use quotation marks. But his stylings are innovative and addictive, his dialogue is highly charged and believable, and he builds characters that you can "see" on the pages. While violence surrounds his characters, it flows from the storyline and is believable and appropriate for the plot and the pacing.
In "Caught Stealing," Hank Thompson is a low profile "everyman" currently serving a stint as a bartender while fighting his own personal demons, including alcohol. He agrees to baby sit his neighbor's cat which opens the door to a series of misadventures that will boggle the reader's mind. Two groups of miscreants are seeking a huge sum of money that Hank's neighbor stole from them. They have reason to believe Hank knows where it is or has access to it. Ultimately the two groups unite, then fragment again as they collectively and individually seek the huge payroll they think Hank has hidden. Hank eventually discovers the "key" to the mess he is in but cannot seem to discover a safe way to extricate himself from the violence prone thugs, including a crooked cop, who are hot on his tail.
Hank has to be the hard luck loser of the year in literature as everything that can go wrong for him, usually does. In short order, he is beaten so severely that a kidney is removed, kidnapped, beaten and threatened again, discovered his girlfriend tortured and murdered, and soon sees most of his remaining friends and acquaintances shot and killed in a killing spree in a local bar gone bad. There are times when this reader was so deeply engrossed in the pain, torment, and suffering Hank was undergoing that I had to stop and put the book down to catch my breath. Equally, the chase scenes and Hank's recurring bad luck will leave the reader gasping for some respite for the poor guy.
I have now read two of the Hank Thompson novels and all the Joe Pitt novels and I can say that Charlie Huston is an author that is now on my must read list. I unequivocally recommend his work to fans of this literary sub genre.
Book Review: RICK "SHAQ" GOLDSTEIN SAYS: "AN ONSLAUGHT OF GUTTURAL VISCERAL WRITING!"
Summary: 5 Stars
There are two main areas I want to cover in this review: The first is the author's writing style, and the second is a review of the story.
Charlie Huston writes like an army machine gunner on speed, using words instead of bullets, and his gun is locked on automatic! His non-stop flurry of words, become sentences, become paragraphs, become pages, without you even realizing that time has passed and many pages have been turned. The excitement and impact of his "street-fighter's" jargon cuts to the bone in burgeoning streams of of unrelenting consciousness. WOW!!! I recommend getting your blood pressure checked after reading one of his books!
Now as far as the story goes, the main character is Henry "call me Hank" Thompson. Before Hank's life became ensconced in the bowels of New York in a deadly "cat" and mouse game of intrigue, he grew up in Northern California, and was a Little League and high school baseball player of great renown, with each of his games being watched by Major League scouts. The scuttlebutt was that Hank would skip college and go right to the pro's. But then in a regional championship game while attempting to steal third base, he had a messy collision with the third baseman, that resulted in a bone in Hank's leg sticking straight out from his calf. The pins they stuck in his fibula restricted growth in the bone, and no one even pretended he would ever play again.
From there his life took him to New York, where he wound up being a bartender with a drinking problem (That's the worst kind of bartender to be!) and things went downhill from there. Hank accepted that station in life, and felt things couldn't get any worse, until one day a neighbor was going out of town and asked him to watch his cat. That simple act of human kindness, led to the following: Hank getting beat to an inch of his life by two Russian-like musclemen, having a kidney removed, having two black cowboys kidnap him and threaten to kill him, have a red-headed Asian torture him, have crooked cops try to kill him, and much, much, more... all at a "warp-speed" machine gun like pace, that doesn't stop! I don't want to give anything else away, so if your Doctor says your blood pressure can take it... Buy the book!
Book Review: This Cat Has Nine Lives
Summary: 5 Stars
I didn't know what I was getting into when I picked up this book. The title, "Caught Stealing," at first suggested a crime story; however, it was immediately clear that the subject of baseball is the string that gets the main character, Hank, through what is an extremely rough ten days in late September, 2000. And yes, there is crime involved. A lot of crime.
This story is VERY well written. The writing is straightforward, conversational and quick. Even without the use of quotation marks or dialog attributions, I had no trouble following it. The writing is what got me to sit through seemingly endless gratuitous violence and the prolific use of the "f-word," (which actually doesn't bother me). I believed this is indeed how each of the characters, Hank, his shaky neighbor, the rotten cop, all the thugs, and Hank's co-horts at the bar where he worked until the first beating got the best of him, spoke this way. In other words, the use of voice is dead-on. Audible. Further, it made me glad I don't hang around in such circles. I don't think Hank ever expected to find himself in this situation either, which makes him all the more likable. We sympathize with him from the start because of his lost dream of being a major league baseball player and then, because of the death of his friend, who died in a car accident when Hank was behind the wheel. It also doesn't hurt that he continually checks in with his parents. In spite of the reeking, bleeding, killing character he becomes, Charlie Huston has the reader rooting for him until the end.
The baseball theme--and a fan's addiction to `his' team--is a clever ploy. (It ties in nicely with Hank's addiction to alcohol.) Bottom line: I simply had to keep turning pages to find out Hank's next move and whether or not his "adopted" cat, Bud, would make it through the ordeal as well. Ultimately, it seems the cat gets the most respect.
Michele Cozzens, Author of A Line Between Friends and The Things I Wish I'd Said.
Book Review: Familiar plot, but still a lean, mean, entertaining read
Summary: 4 Stars
Caught Stealing is a vivid, bone crunching, visceral thrill-ride that is a lean, mean entertaining read. It's the kind of pulp fiction that Quentin Tarantino would be ideally suited to bring to the big screen: `Rated R due to scenes of extreme violence, coarse language, and animal cruelty'. The violence here is raw: `brass-knuckles and gun fights', rather than the "knife-wielding- ritual-murders' you find in serial killer novels.
My only criticism of this novel isn't necessarily a criticism at all. It's more of a limitation. The plot here is rudimentary stuff. Edgy writing, vivid characters, and page turning suspense can only elevate it so high. The plot is straight out of the `crime fiction playbook'. An innocent man inadvertently comes into possession of something that competing factions of bad guys want. Initially he has no idea what it could be and he suffers greatly for his ignorance. Eventually our good guy will find out what the object is, why it is so valuable, and turn the tables on the bad guys, often pitting the competing factions against one another before settling the final scores himself.
Sound familiar? Of course it does. It's a retread of dozens of similar novels/ films.
Despite its predictable story-line, and the inevitable transformation of our passive, `down-on-his luck' hero as he finds his `inner avenger', Caught Stealing is an enjoyable ride: provided you like your humor morbid, your violence graphic, and you're not prone to become too attached to secondary characters (who will inevitably meet a violent end before the final page is turned).
This is a great, fast paced, brutally violent, darkly funny, page-turner, that despite its predictable story-line manages to build suspense quite effectively near the end. I look forward to reading more novels from Charlie Huston.