Keep the Devil Waiting

by J.P.S. Brown

Returning to his Texas home from a Navy hospital in Japan, Roy Adams accepts a proposition from a band of adventurers--to smuggle a blackmarket cache from Mexico to Las Vegas through a barricade of border cops and drug runners

336 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Where to begin? This is a paperback I came across while bobbling through the Free Book Bin where I work, and recklessly adopted as my lunch book. I think it thinks it's a western. Basically, it's about a cowboy who gets "roped" into becoming a marijuana smuggler, a career move that eventually sees all his friends killed, whereupon he turns to alcohol and whores, the least accomodating of whom locks him in a cabin and proceeds to throw turds (her own, fresh) in his face and disfigure his penis with lit cigarettes. Then things really go south.

"Devil" finds a way to be offensive to nearly everyone. Not two paragraphs in, and the entire population of Japan has been crudely maligned. It ain't foolin' around. As it has become my habit over the years to gravitate towards books that are flagrant pieces of crap, I notice that the late '80s and early '90s seem to have been a particularly hedonistic time for popular fiction. Pick up a mainstream horror or murder-mystery from that era, and you'll likely see what I'm talking about. Angry and ugly, desperate to be regarded as over the top. I've been genuinely taken aback more than a few times by 25-cent thrift store paperbacks with ridiculous covers.

This thing was written in 1992, and on the whole it's every bit as unhinged and nasty as the crippled alcoholic cowboy punching bag that serves as its crusty (though not entirely unengaging) narrator. Yet the gross-looking author proudly posing, practically preening on the back cover gets off a few appealingly dipshit turns of phrase, none of which I can presently recall or recount as I've since tossed the book back into the bin for some other misguided sap to discover. Someday I hope to encounter someone who's actually read this book and engage them in a lively discussion, but I fear the chances of that taking place are probably not in my favor.

In closing, there are less effective tonics for workaday numbness than graphic depictions of the sexual disfigurement of a cowboy at the hands of a coke-addled prostitute.

[Jordan West · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite odd, in its way; basically, this is Stone's Dog Soldiers as adapted by Hal Needham, replete with the attendant cornpone humor and good old boy antics of the latter (but leavened with a pleasingly casual amorality and other bits of quirkiness), until the last act which feels like Jim Thompson by way of Takashi Miike, wherein the protagonist undergoes repeated humiliations and torture as the prisoner of a psychotic prostitute, and manages to conjure up a real state of existential dread along with the degredation and bodily fluids before the required (but again, quite odd) happy ending.