God Is a Bullet - Boston Teran

Stylistic Sherman-tankery.

On being bough-beaten by Boston Teran...

Boston Teran has no time at all for the notion that the shadow of a bough is more compelling than the bough itself.

Teran, you see, doesn't believe in the power of suggestion. In fact, he thinks suggestion is for prissy dumbfucks. Boston Teran doesn't like to suggest anything. He prefers to proclaim via megaphone from the back of a pickup that sounds klaxons, and flashes its lights as it proceeds down crowded streets—kinda like the Popemobile.

And that bough that I mentioned? Well, BT likes to drop it on the reader's head, from an altitude of at least 10,000 feet. And as the reader is lying on the ground, bloody and with multiple compound fractures, Teran starts to beat the bejesus out of the poor bastard—just to make sure the bough didn't escape the reader's notice.

I guess what I'm trying to say—borrowing from BT's armoury of stylistic Sherman-tankery—is that BT ain't subtle. In fact, I'm sitting here at my computer chortling at the idea of Boston Teran rewriting Remains of the Day. Ah, now that would be worth the price of admission! It would be like watching Frankenstein, complete with cartoon sutures and bolts in his neck, going 10 rounds with the chianti-sipping, fava-bean-slurping Hannibal Lecter…

Actually, it wouldn't be like that at all. My apologies.

In God Is a Bullet, which won the prestigious John Creasey Medal for best first crime novel, a satanic cult kills Bob Hightower's ex-wife and her husband, and abducts Bob's teenage daughter. The cops are corrupt and clueless. So Bob, accompanied only by a former cultmember and junkie called Case, wades into the badlands on the Calexico border in pursuit of the cult, and of his daughter, who he both hopes and fears is still alive.

That's the bare bones. In what follows, Teran, with true Lynchian glee, exposes the sordid underbelly of Bob's community and friends, and even his family. There's no mistaking the relish with which BT documents Bob's transformation from whitebread desk-jockey into a tattooed, mustachioed, guns-a-blazing facsimile of the cultists he's chasing. No doubt that's part of the book's appeal: the ghastly glamour of the victim turning the tables on the victimiser.

The first time I read Bullet, I was blown away. Hypnotised. My eyes were spot-welded to the page. (Which made reading really difficult, believe me.) Nasty, violent, foulmouthed, malevolent, violent, terrifying, violent—that was Bullet in spades. And well written too.

And that's what really struck me. Here was a writer stalking the territory of Robert McCammon and Richard Stark, but doing it with burned-out elan, manic wordplay, and stilletoed metaphor. It was high art meets down-and-dirty horror. And man, did I like it.

Then I reread it.

As I stumbled groggily from one ludicrously overwritten passage to the next, I wondered what the hell was going on. Was this the same book? How could I have got it so wrong? Fuck—don't tell me someone spiked my coffee!

But I should pause here, because I don’t want to give you the wrong impression—BT isn't uniformly bad, even on rereading. Far from it. Sometimes he's very good. For instance, after a lengthy exchange, during which Bob reaffirms his belief in God, Case reaches into her pocket and produces a bullet:

Take a look. This is the ultimate life form, the highest art form. The great equalizer. It crosses all political, social, and religious lines. It has no ties. It plays no favorites. It cuts both ways. It is as simple and profound as any fuckin' parable… It carries history on its back. All life falls before it. All faith resides within that virgin brass casing. The virgin birth, baby.

This is good, right? It's hardass, it's succinct, and it's provocative. Look at the isocolon, the anaphora, the alliteration. And it's all unforced too. Another sample of BT near his best:

She tosses the rocks one by one into the sleeve of a stream a few feet away that's being helped along by a runoff of sewage. Arrow weeds grow out of the mealy wet soil, mixing in raggy lines with the burro grass and giving the hollow an opposing natural geometry. (187)

This is talent. Look at that word choice! "Sleeve and raggy". Both unexpected choices, but fresh, and so right it's like a tumbril clicking into place in a lock. And what about that soil? It's not just wet, it's "mealy". "Arrow weeds" and "burro grass" add pleasing specificity to the para, which BT ices with "opposing natural geometry". Yes! Did ya feel it? That satisfying register change? BT goes from the informality of tosses into a toecurling description of "sewage" and "mealy wet soil", and then back-ends it with the cool and abstracted "opposing natural geometry".

This is BT in microcosm—when he's good. Precise and surprising word choice. Pleasing specificity. The fusing of different registers: profane and religious, slangy and erudite, sleazy and metaphysical.

That's the good, now for the bad:

Looking down at the balloons of white bitter crystalline compound bundled neatly as gifts, she begins to feel the memory skin of it all. A black-and-bluesy cocktail in the key of H comes a-calling. The beautiful high-five sense of self-loathing that needs a little vein tonic to cut away the highs and lows, leaving you in the perfect flatness of its murky landscape. She can see herself in the drawer: the heroin, the syringe, the sport of trappings of the lifestyle. Heraldic in their callings. And each balloon a lung of breath to blissful forgetting. The white blind flatline to pain. (219)

So much for "burned-out elan", hey? It's not even bad in a smarty-pants, ironic way—it's dead earnest. Fuck, this is so bad, where do you begin? How about with "memory skin"? Abominations like that happen when a writer tries too hard to coin a startling phrase.

But wait, that's not all, because now the estimable Mr T really hits his stride with "A black-and bluesy cocktail in the key of H comes a-calling" and "beautiful high-five sense of self-loathing that needs a little vein tonic or the white blind flatline to pain". Not even the Pope's medical team could revive this shlock; it's killed by its own overstated hardassedness. This is BT at his worst: when he strains for a descriptive frisson with practically every word. OK, that's it. I can't take any more. And anyway, bad writing, unlike good writing, is pretty self-explanatory.

So that's the good and the bad dealt with, which leaves only the silly. Try this on for size: "You're fuckin' with the black rider, Mister Yuppie Boy." Or how about: "I'm coming up out of your dreams if you don't tell us…I swear. I'll play witch and disciple across your throat while you fuckin' sleep." (188) Scary, isn't it? Just not in the way BT intends.

How could I have got it soooo wrong on my first reading? And if I was so wrong about Bullet, what else might I have got hopelessly bassackwards? Maybe Middlemarch is just an endless round of tea-drinking? Maybe What the Crow Said really is just sub-Twain? I have to stop now. I'm getting scared.

In my defence I can only cite Richard A Lanham, an American academic. Lanham distinguishes between looking through writing and looking at it. When you look through writing, you read for content and not surface-level stylistics. The reverse applies when you look at writing. The first time I read Bullet, I must have been looking through the writing (so far through it's a wonder I didn't see China). On second reading—with my thirst for story and what-happens-next quenched—I looked at the style. (My eyes! My eyes!)

Anyway, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

The sad thing is that BT is a talent. Seriously. There's some good stuff in Bullet. But it's like a vein of gold in a heap of slag—you have to mine it to find it. It's not just first-novel syndrome, either. BT's second novel, Never Count Out the Dead, has the same deficiencies. More so.

So is BT destined to be an unfulfilled talent? I hope not, because there's greatness in him (very-goodness at least). Even if he could ration his absurdities. Space them out a bit. One every 10 pages instead of one every second paragraph. He could do that, couldn't he?

I live in hope.

-- Simon Williamson