The Good Book: Fairy Tales for Hard Men by Tom Leins

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Exploring the dark, bottom-end of short crime/noir fiction (Switchblade, Horror Sleaze Trash, Yellow Mama, Shotgun Honey, Tough, Pulp Modern, Rock and a Hard Place ...), I've identified a couple authors who nail it, including C.W. Blackwell, Cindy Rosmus, and Serena Jayne.

Add Tom Leins to the list.

Bleak, obscene, violent, grotesque--Liens checks all the boxes.

Add one more. Laugh-out-loud funny:

"Ordell knew he wanted to be a hooker the first time he saw Mama zip up her thigh-high boots, lean against the sink and scrub her rancid fanny with a wet wipe."

Or this:

"Plenty of people hate him, but he's a good man, always done right by me. He has a ragged, perforated cheek where he was hit with knuckle-dusters in a bar fight at the Dollar last Christmas. When he smokes it oozes through the flimsy patch of skin on his face."

Liens has a way with words, including a Pynchon-esque flair for character names: Fingerfuck Flanagan, Gringo Starr, Chicken Lips Delgado, Horace "Pig Pen" Pigg. And he writes memorable fight scenes:

"He rounds on me, using my kidneys as a speedbag. I slide the Motorola out of its holster and slam it into his cheekbone. He grunts, and I bring it down on this nose--hard. I crunch the handset into his eye socket, and he wobbles like a Salvation Army wardrobe. He offers me a mad, rubbery smile. I hit it hard enough to loosen his dental work, and he finally collapses."

And nails the aging and decrepitude that's heading our way: "I look down at my gone-to-fat chest, straining against my tribal police uniform. It looks more swollen than Sunday Night Suzette from the Slop Shop after her botched enhancement. I laugh to myself. That was some fuckin' night. Between her tits and my meaty torso, we couldn't even get close enough to kiss. I had to fuck her bandit style over the trunk of my cruiser at closing time, while the club spewed its patrons out into the parking lot."

Leins' talent for figurative language, as in the Salvation Army wardrobe cited above, kept me turning the pages. It just keeps coming and coming. Here's more:

"When people ask me what a hostile takeover is, I tell them it is just like a regular takeover, but the guy signing the papers has a sawn-off shotgun barrel between his teeth."

"Walter 'Waxwork' Wallace is tall and gaunt. He's a man of degenerate appetites. The kind of guy who uses prostitutes as alibis. He quit wrestling after suffering a prolapsed rectum almost a decade ago, but stuck around Testament like a particularly virulent STD."

"On my first day in the big house a guy named Lombard who I sat next to on the prison bus told a couple of gangbangers I was a chomo because I refused to give him my last cigarette. Those bastards fucked me methodically, like it was a job application."

I read The Good Book twice to see how it held up. It held up. It's grim, but not too grim. There's an underlying sympathy for the creatures in Leins' universe of washed-up wrestlers, thugs, bag men, whores and swindlers that smooths the edges. The humor and wit elevate it above other hard-edged crime fiction I've read. No, it's not a book you want to curl up with on a rainy afternoon, that's for sure. It's best enjoyed in short bites. Five stars.



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