A thesaurus book. Would make another good movie by the author/director. ( )

H O L Y S H I T

This book was recommended to me after I gushed to an acquaintance about S. Craig Zahler's films not knowing that the Director/Screenwriter/Composer of both Bone Tomahawk and Brawl in Cell Block 99 was also an author. I mean COME ON... Calm down, dude. Or don't. Actually don't... Please don't... Don't stop... Give me MORE!

I went into this with eyes wide open. I knew that this book was going to have some tense, brutal, heart-wrenching, violent, and gruesome moments. I looked forward to them, in fact. And yet I was left slack jawed from the sheer barbarity and depravity of the opening paragraphs of the very first chapter. This book should really come with a trigger warning.

More importantly, however, I was also hoping for the same character driven storyline that held me absolutely captivated when watching Bone Tomahawk and I was not disappointed. Much like the film, the book follows a small group of men on a mission to rescue two kidnapped sisters being held captive and forced into prostitution in Mexico. The interplay between them with their disparate dispositions and temperaments is the real driving force of this book. You get to know just enough about the characters to genuinely care about them. And there’s the rub… because if you know Zahler, you just know that you shouldn’t get attached. But you do.

I’d like to have given this book 5 stars but for the first 50 pages or so Zahler seems irrationally determined to use language so arcane as to make the prose impenetrable. I’m a lover of lexicon but having to wade through clunky, verbose descriptions drowning in highfalutin $10 words made my head spin and, frankly, annoyed the living crap out of me. At first I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt... maybe he was using language to set the mood? maybe The Gentleman, being well educated, would use such elaborate language?... but just no. It didn’t work. There wasn’t a single word that I didn’t know (or couldn’t extrapolate the meaning of) and yet some passages (sentences even!) were so chock full of unnecessarily inflated vocabulary that it was downright distracting. There were several rolls of my eyes and I even snorted derisively more than once. Luckily, however, he seemed to have lost his thesaurus somewhere along the way and then it was pretty much smooth sailing. If smooth sailing can include lots and lots and lots of turbulent mayhem.

All that said, I’d highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed his films or anyone who loves a truly hardcore story. ( )