This is a weird book. A cocaine dealer's inner monologue as he is caught up in - and enthusiastically escalates - a ridiculous and pointless onslaught of extreme violence, horrifying enough that it becomes cartoony. No one learns anything. Most characters don't survive. Nothing is gained, and the world is objectively worse off. And it's continuously entertaining. The sociopathic narrator has a voice that is fun to read. You like him as a character, while he also makes it completely undeniable that he is a horrible person. A true "wtf did I just read?" sort of book. ( )

What an idiotic inane book this was. When I got to part 2 around 100 pages and still nothing of any interest happened in this book I gave up, and it felt like I had been reading it for a month.
This book is not interesting, it is not funny, the writing style is I guess an attempt to be gonzo style but it fails. ( )

The Price You Pay is entirely in the first person present-tense voice of Jack Price (pun intended and explicitly emphasized) and his immediate interlocutors. It's all internal monologue and external dialogue with not a quotation mark in sight, not even that em-dash alternative, and never a "he said." Simple paragraph breaks and sparing direct address do all the heavy lifting of speaker identification, and they do it well.

Where plot is concerned, the book is a clear if remote descendant of John Buchan's seminal "thriller" The Thirty-Nine Steps, although set in the 21st century with an elite coke dealer protagonist and a lot more collateral damage (also, no war propaganda). To the episodic man-on-the-run structure are added extra helpings of violence, plus the energy and ambivalent misanthropy of an early Chuck Pahluniuk novel.

"I am a fucking asymmetric criminal startup. I got limited expertise in criminal strategic warfare. I hotdesk and I outsource and I franchise but what I mostly have is a core concept, forward momentum and the unassailable fact that I'm crazier than a fibreglass hairball." (73)

I don't think this book has any socially redeeming value other than being twisted and funny as hell.

Affluent drug dealer Jack Price is surprised to learn that the woman who owns the apartment below his penthouse has been murdered execution style. Wondering if this is somehow related to himself he asks around and sets off an incredible chain of events that will change his life forever when a ruthless gang of assassins are put on his trail.

This is a very violent and profanity infested, humorously dark tale that I have briefly described elsewhere as being the illegitimate offspring of Elmore Leonard and Guy Ritchie. This is written in a first person narrative and the pace is pretty much unrelenting. Situations often verge on the absurd but there are also insights into how the world which these people inhabit could be operating right under our very noses utilising the dark web and businesses that operate at the edges of legality. Personally, I loved it but it won’t be for everyone.

PS. Negan’s bat is now my 2nd favourite thing named Lucille. ( )

Ludicrous, sweary, murder-rampage, none of which I'm inherently opposed to, but it does get a bit samey. OK to while away a wet afternoon. ( )