Death Puppet

by Jim Nisbet

She’s lived all but one year of her life in Dip, and not much of what goes on there escapes her eye. But then, not much of what goes on in Dip is worth noticing. That is, until a traveling salesman named Tucker Harris drifts into town. Mattie cuts out on her steady guy just long enough for this stranger to introduce her to his bizarre brand of safe sex, and after Tucker splits, Mattie figures to go on with her life the same as before. What begins as sassy complicity in a capricious tryst triggers a subtle and vertiginous slide into hell, with no stops for beer or introspection. Mattie suffers the horrible revelation that there will be no savior capable of rescuing her sanity—let alone her life.

Genres: Crime

224 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1989

About the author

San Francisco writer Jim Nisbet has published eleven novels, including the acclaimed Lethal Injection. He has also published five volumes of poetry. His novel, Dark Companion, was shorted-listed for the 2006 Hammett Prize. Various of his works have been translated into French, German, Japanese, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Greek, Russian and Romanian.

Aside from reading and performing his own work for some forty-five years, Nisbet has written and seen produced a modest handful of one-act plays and monologues, including Valentine, Note from Earth, WonderEndz™ SmackVision™ and Alas, Poor Yorick, and himself directed the original productions of most of these works.

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nisbet's "Death Puppet" is a mind-blowing tour-de-force of pulp crime extravaganza. What is so amazing about the way Nisbet designed this book is that you as the reader have no clue that World War III is about to explode. He so gently and cleverly takes you down the rabbit hole that you don't know what exactly the build up is leading to. It all starts with a stream of consciousness drunken reverie as Harris and Mattie and the two betas in the tank strive to survive a night filled with every kind of debauchery this couple can imagine. And don't forget the little devil on Harris' shoulder that he has an ongoing conversation with and the book of French poetry he spouts. Mattie can't believe her eyes when she spies the wreckage and the brandy bottles littering her home in the a.m. Thing is our favorite perky little waitress has never been so bloody hungover before and can't bear to tell anyone about her orgiastic one-night stand with this traveling salesman who only shows up once a year. Again, this is all a crazy prelude to where this tale is going and where this train wreck is taking Mattie. Out here in the drylands east of the Cascades nothing ever happens and life never changes. Or does it?

[Still · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel pretty much defies reviewing.

It's a cross between Tom Robbins (1st two-three chapters) Edward Abbey (Chapter Seven), and Thomas McGuane and Robert Stone every other chapter outside the aforementioned.

This is my second time reading this novel. I first read it back in 1989 when it was originally published by Black Lizard in hardback format. It was the first Nisbet book I'd ever read.
I was hooked on his writing immediately.
I'd always remembered this novel fondly, yet I distinctly recalled it being a noir but nope... this is a Modern-Day Western complete with cowboy boots, lots of shootin' irons and horses -even one named after a Vietnam War era massacre, "Hoc Bhui".

The 1st chapter requires studious concentration. Don't let "Tucker Harris's" cross-talk and internal dialogues with the devil who lives inside his head confuse you. Don't allow the heaping helpings of the poetry of Paul Verlaine in the original French (untranslated) throw you off track. Just glide along where possible. All will be revealed in due time and way before the ultra-violence breaks out.

You'll meet Mattie in the first chapter, too. She's a main character in the novel but she's just Tucker Harris's living, breathing sex-doll in Chapter One. Her character is fleshed out along the way and she proves integral to the novel.

Tucker Harris is soon to have an unexpected reunion with his old Vietnam war buddies Jedediah Dowd and Scott Michaels and Michaels' friend Eddie Mertz. Like most friendships forged under fire and massacre, these guys just hate surprises.

I love this novel. Especially Nisbet's descriptions of the east side of the Washington State Cascades, some fifty miles from The Grand Coulee Dam, where stands a foreboding high desert:

Here stretches a high desert interrupted only occasionally by the ruins of an ambitious homestead, its roof collapsed by snow and wind, its fences lying down, its cottonwoods blasted by lightning, tumbleweeds huddled on the threshold of the shattered front door. There are a few large ranches -- very large ranches -- and these run mostly cattle, because here, in spite of the near proximity of the potential of irrigation, the land is simply too rough and too wild to farm. The landscape is a weird, lonely vastness of sagebrush and dust, where the wind never stops; but the single overriding feature of this country consists of the spooky, gnarled outcrops of pure basalt that stand up out of the land with the startling dereliction of an abandoned freighter listing over the dory of yourself. These rough, reddish brown and black formations are a little bigger than human scale, a little smaller than human ambition, unyielding, inexplicable. In appearance they're much like the limestone tufas exposed over the centuries by the receding brine of California's Mono Lake. Some look like large haystacks hacked out of solid cement. Some are ragged cubes as big as a house and shaped much like one. Others are jagged cylinders with domed tops like small grain silos. All of them represent the remains of a violent geological past of this area, and some say, as such, they are icons perfectly suited for the speculation and awe due to those epochs. Others, of a different church, shoot at them for no reason at all. When you do find a wheat farm in this country, and there are a few, you'll see neatly furrowed fields that sweep up to, around and past these basalt intransigencies, much like the rocks deliberately placed at random in a meditation garden. Nobody can afford to move the bigger formations, nor even to so much as blow them up, even if it were possible. Basalt is hard stuff. The frequency of distribution of these outcrops is not dense; on the contrary, its not unusual to see only a few of them from any vantage point. That is to say, to the casual observer, it doesn't appear that the landscape is made up entirely of these basalt monuments: By their relative scarcity they seem anomalies. But, in fact, they dominate the terrain, and stem from the very bedrock of the entire region.

On the open range, the basalt formations come in all sizes, and it is common, at dusk, to mistake them for other things altogether. This lends an additional ghostliness to a country already known for the whispers and screams carried along by the ever-restless winds, and the interminable loneliness which is the inescapable lot of anyone who tries to settle there. It is a wont of the human imagination to ascribe purpose and reason to inexplicable sounds and shapes imperfectly heard and seen, and the entire race might be considered as two children huddled in their tent, trying to identify the night sounds emanating from the wilderness in terms of their -mostly imaginary - experience. The basalt formations of Douglas County are just such stimuli to the active nerves, and the lore of the region is rife with tales of the supernatural, inexplicable events, UFO sightings, and mysterious disappearances.

And it goes on to get even weirder than that in the chapter discussing the comings and goings of events other-wordly and worldly enough in that part of the Cascades of Washington State.

Highly Recommended.
Yep. Another damned 5 star rating.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stylistically a cross between Tom Robbins and T. C. Boyle. Nisbet can flat-out write, but it runs on and on in places.