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Kiss The Devil Goodnight
Bill Derringer, Yale dropout and Iraq war vet goes on a trip to Florida with his wife Edie and their kids to visit Edie’s Aunt Ida.
Turns out this trip was never going to be an ordinary family vacation.
Drawn into a botched robbery Bill is lucky to escape with his life and as his wife and her aunt disappear to Mexico with the money, Bill is caught by the cops and goes to prison.
Five and a half years later Bill is paroled and is torn between a desire to reunite with his kids and his quest to track down Aunt Ida and Edie and meter out some revenge.
So begins this road trip crime novel that weaves its way from Atlanta to Mexico City and winds up in the wilds of the Yucatan jungle.
This darkly funny, high octane, neo-pulp tale is a search for sex, love, revenge, the meaning of life and a suitcase lost by William Burroughs.
Praise for Kiss The Devil Goodnight.
“Jonathan Woods’ Kiss the Devil Goodnight, is debauched, deadpan, and inebriating—the confessions of a comedic psychopath. Wild fun! You’ll never take sex or death seriously again. Buy this book!”—Vicki Hendricks, author of Miami Purity, Voluntary Madness and the Edgar Award finalist Cruel Poetry
“Jonathan Woods’ Kiss the Devil Goodnight is a street-smart, fast-paced and deliciously cynical tale that races like an 18-wheeler with blown brakes from Florida’s badlands to the dark heart of Mexico. The story it tells of sex, money and revenge is as steamy and dangerous as a crocodile-ridden swamp.”
—Stephen Amidon, author of Human Capital (basis of the Oscar-nominated Italian film of the same title), Security and The Real Justice
“What a wonderful novel. I flat out loved Kiss the Devil Goodnight … I had a pure surge of delight on reading it, it’s fun, fast, furious, frantic and oh so fantastically written. A rare treat.”—Ken Bruen, two-time Shamus Award-winning author of The Guards, London Boulevard, Blitz and Purgatory
“Kiss the Devil Goodnight is a frenzied and sprawling masterpiece that blasts through the boundaries of southern-gothic. Featuring one of the most memorable anti-heroes in literature, this novel cements Jonathan Woods' reputation as one of the truly original voices in crime fiction.”
—Jon Bassoff, author of Corrosion, Factory Town and The Incurables
Praise for Jonathan Woods.
“If you crossed the Coen brothers with Kurt Vonnegut, then threw in some Jim Thompson along with a couple of dollops of vintage Tarantino, you’d come up with a writer very much like Woods.”—Ben Fountain, award-winning author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
“Woods is the David Lynch of short crime fiction.”—Spinetingler Magazine
“The 19 tales of erotic or absurdist noir in Bad Juju are lively, imaginative, sometimes parodic, often darkly funny, accurately likened on the back cover to opium dreams and Quentin Tarantino…all executed with enormous skill by a writer of formidable talent.” —Jon L. Breen, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
“Violence, sex and gonzo plot twists fuel Woods’ diverting collection Bad Juju…most set in sun-and-blood-drenched borderlands. These stories amp up the volume to 11.” —Publishers Weekly
“Jonathan Woods has arrived. A Death in Mexico is a great and telling ride south of the border into madness and mayhem. I loved it.” —Michael Connelly, author of The Lincoln Lawyer and the Harry Bosch crime novels.
Turns out this trip was never going to be an ordinary family vacation.
Drawn into a botched robbery Bill is lucky to escape with his life and as his wife and her aunt disappear to Mexico with the money, Bill is caught by the cops and goes to prison.
Five and a half years later Bill is paroled and is torn between a desire to reunite with his kids and his quest to track down Aunt Ida and Edie and meter out some revenge.
So begins this road trip crime novel that weaves its way from Atlanta to Mexico City and winds up in the wilds of the Yucatan jungle.
This darkly funny, high octane, neo-pulp tale is a search for sex, love, revenge, the meaning of life and a suitcase lost by William Burroughs.
Praise for Kiss The Devil Goodnight.
“Jonathan Woods’ Kiss the Devil Goodnight, is debauched, deadpan, and inebriating—the confessions of a comedic psychopath. Wild fun! You’ll never take sex or death seriously again. Buy this book!”—Vicki Hendricks, author of Miami Purity, Voluntary Madness and the Edgar Award finalist Cruel Poetry
“Jonathan Woods’ Kiss the Devil Goodnight is a street-smart, fast-paced and deliciously cynical tale that races like an 18-wheeler with blown brakes from Florida’s badlands to the dark heart of Mexico. The story it tells of sex, money and revenge is as steamy and dangerous as a crocodile-ridden swamp.”
—Stephen Amidon, author of Human Capital (basis of the Oscar-nominated Italian film of the same title), Security and The Real Justice
“What a wonderful novel. I flat out loved Kiss the Devil Goodnight … I had a pure surge of delight on reading it, it’s fun, fast, furious, frantic and oh so fantastically written. A rare treat.”—Ken Bruen, two-time Shamus Award-winning author of The Guards, London Boulevard, Blitz and Purgatory
“Kiss the Devil Goodnight is a frenzied and sprawling masterpiece that blasts through the boundaries of southern-gothic. Featuring one of the most memorable anti-heroes in literature, this novel cements Jonathan Woods' reputation as one of the truly original voices in crime fiction.”
—Jon Bassoff, author of Corrosion, Factory Town and The Incurables
Praise for Jonathan Woods.
“If you crossed the Coen brothers with Kurt Vonnegut, then threw in some Jim Thompson along with a couple of dollops of vintage Tarantino, you’d come up with a writer very much like Woods.”—Ben Fountain, award-winning author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
“Woods is the David Lynch of short crime fiction.”—Spinetingler Magazine
“The 19 tales of erotic or absurdist noir in Bad Juju are lively, imaginative, sometimes parodic, often darkly funny, accurately likened on the back cover to opium dreams and Quentin Tarantino…all executed with enormous skill by a writer of formidable talent.” —Jon L. Breen, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
“Violence, sex and gonzo plot twists fuel Woods’ diverting collection Bad Juju…most set in sun-and-blood-drenched borderlands. These stories amp up the volume to 11.” —Publishers Weekly
“Jonathan Woods has arrived. A Death in Mexico is a great and telling ride south of the border into madness and mayhem. I loved it.” —Michael Connelly, author of The Lincoln Lawyer and the Harry Bosch crime novels.
254 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 15, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 21, 2021
Kiss The Devil Good Night is an amazing, irreverent, pulpy, nasty tour-de-force that takes you on a down-spiraling journey from the alligator-infested swamplands of Florida to the perverted denizens of Miami's halfway houses to the crazy desperate world of the Yucatán and its third world outlook. It is a wild ride fueled by untamed lust, desperation, thirsting for revenge, and more.
It is written with a keen sense of sarcasm, a libido-pounding nerve, and a sinking feeling that there's nowhere lower to sink to. In short, this novel, kinky, pulpy, irreverent, is a great selection of modern twentieth century noir.
Where else are you going to find a narrator who describes his mother as "Looking like some tobacco road hussy in crotch-nipping cutoff jeans and a Red Man chew T-shirt that had shrunk up real good in the wash. One minute she was leaning over the fender of my father’s shiny, black Mercedes checking the oil, the next she was sitting in his lap toying with his dipstick." Wow. Right there you got all the irreverent atmosphere you could want.
The story is just so chockfull of stuff that even armed robberies and random deaths seem to be minor details. Attacks by groups of overgrown teenagers are described as cheap remakes of Clockwork Orange. Iraq war veterans, prison yard showdowns, trampy James, secret jungle missions, lap dancers, drug cartels, mummy returns, lesbians, femme fatale with sea green eyes, warped nightmares, halfway houses run by Captain Ahab and his mail order bride, and more.
This novel is just filled with all the good stuff we want from our swampiest, lustiest, revenge-seeking pulp literature.
It is written with a keen sense of sarcasm, a libido-pounding nerve, and a sinking feeling that there's nowhere lower to sink to. In short, this novel, kinky, pulpy, irreverent, is a great selection of modern twentieth century noir.
Where else are you going to find a narrator who describes his mother as "Looking like some tobacco road hussy in crotch-nipping cutoff jeans and a Red Man chew T-shirt that had shrunk up real good in the wash. One minute she was leaning over the fender of my father’s shiny, black Mercedes checking the oil, the next she was sitting in his lap toying with his dipstick." Wow. Right there you got all the irreverent atmosphere you could want.
The story is just so chockfull of stuff that even armed robberies and random deaths seem to be minor details. Attacks by groups of overgrown teenagers are described as cheap remakes of Clockwork Orange. Iraq war veterans, prison yard showdowns, trampy James, secret jungle missions, lap dancers, drug cartels, mummy returns, lesbians, femme fatale with sea green eyes, warped nightmares, halfway houses run by Captain Ahab and his mail order bride, and more.
This novel is just filled with all the good stuff we want from our swampiest, lustiest, revenge-seeking pulp literature.
December 30, 2023
Fun, foul, wickedly funny and o' so politically incorrect. Not a book for snowflakes and pretentious nerds.
December 9, 2016
Offensive in All the Right Places
After the wife rats out William Derringer, then dumps him for her own Aunt Ida, he lands up in “Oopawalla State Prison, a maze of dank cement and steel cellblocks and razor wired exercise yards, squatted like a poisonous bufo toad on the flat Florida landscape.” After all he is forced to endure, I was game for a little vengeful action, especially if it promises a romp through all things seamy, southern & smutridden.
Pushed to choose between caring for his two abandoned kids (themselves chips off the old blockhead) or a drug fueled odyssey of revenge from the backwoods of Florida to the bowels of Mexico, we know what’s coming.
The weird thing is that I actually liked Bill from time to time. Really, I came that close…. I often agreed with his more philosophical musings about life; the anti-hero’s lament for the lost ideal, “Time had a way of dulling the harsh details of living, just as the endless tumbling surf smoothed the razor edges of broken glass.”
Somehow the plot holds together throughout the throbbing madness, employing the classic three part rise and fall, although the subject matter would surely find Aristotle spinning furiously in his grave. Revenge lust is the through line that haunts the text but the sidetrips and bizarre entanglements are the spice that solidifies the form. Characters, like the knife wielding Suki-Wa from a halfway house; the dying Margaret (“Gently I picked her up like an old paper sack of odds and ends bound for the Salvation Army…) and the oddly faithful Canadian Jane who is in it for the long haul as well as the challenge to best her own perversions.
This roadtrip from hell finally devolves into a few nights in a Mexican hotel
where “..the only light was a frosted-glass ceiling fixture in which a quantity of fly carcasses lay scattered like dirty little thoughts.” And our hero picks up additional women, plotlines (a lost Burroughs suitcase) and grudges, leading to a final “Apocalypse Now” style showdown in the bowels of the Mexican jungle.
Oftentimes in JW’s World of postmodern noir, the simile is all and everything. “Silence hung over us like an elephant suspended on a bungee cord,” or, “I stood in front of the desk like an out of work cigar store Indian.” Images crowd the pages of this work, each vying for attention and oftentimes one steps off the page, and I stop reading, gazing hopelessly from the text.
In my view this is by far JW’s finest work.
After the wife rats out William Derringer, then dumps him for her own Aunt Ida, he lands up in “Oopawalla State Prison, a maze of dank cement and steel cellblocks and razor wired exercise yards, squatted like a poisonous bufo toad on the flat Florida landscape.” After all he is forced to endure, I was game for a little vengeful action, especially if it promises a romp through all things seamy, southern & smutridden.
Pushed to choose between caring for his two abandoned kids (themselves chips off the old blockhead) or a drug fueled odyssey of revenge from the backwoods of Florida to the bowels of Mexico, we know what’s coming.
The weird thing is that I actually liked Bill from time to time. Really, I came that close…. I often agreed with his more philosophical musings about life; the anti-hero’s lament for the lost ideal, “Time had a way of dulling the harsh details of living, just as the endless tumbling surf smoothed the razor edges of broken glass.”
Somehow the plot holds together throughout the throbbing madness, employing the classic three part rise and fall, although the subject matter would surely find Aristotle spinning furiously in his grave. Revenge lust is the through line that haunts the text but the sidetrips and bizarre entanglements are the spice that solidifies the form. Characters, like the knife wielding Suki-Wa from a halfway house; the dying Margaret (“Gently I picked her up like an old paper sack of odds and ends bound for the Salvation Army…) and the oddly faithful Canadian Jane who is in it for the long haul as well as the challenge to best her own perversions.
This roadtrip from hell finally devolves into a few nights in a Mexican hotel
where “..the only light was a frosted-glass ceiling fixture in which a quantity of fly carcasses lay scattered like dirty little thoughts.” And our hero picks up additional women, plotlines (a lost Burroughs suitcase) and grudges, leading to a final “Apocalypse Now” style showdown in the bowels of the Mexican jungle.
Oftentimes in JW’s World of postmodern noir, the simile is all and everything. “Silence hung over us like an elephant suspended on a bungee cord,” or, “I stood in front of the desk like an out of work cigar store Indian.” Images crowd the pages of this work, each vying for attention and oftentimes one steps off the page, and I stop reading, gazing hopelessly from the text.
In my view this is by far JW’s finest work.
February 5, 2018
When I first heard of Kiss the Devil Goodnight, I was excited by the great title and the settings--Florida and Mexico, two of my favorite noir places, and the McGuffin is a suitcase that once belonged to William S. Burroughs. The book was hard to find, with used copies going for well over fifty dollars. Finally it became available on Kindle. I would have been very angry if I spent that much money on it. It's pretty bad.
Written by Jonathan Woods, Kiss the Devil Goodnight feels like a book written by a perspicacious teenager. It's about a guy named Bill Derringer, who has all the qualities a teenage boy might want--he's tough, he's attractive to women, and he even went to Yale. He also has an adolescent attitude toward sex.
He was trained as an expert in hand-to-hand combat by the Army. He is married to Edie, with two kids. One day she says they need an adventure and go to Orlando to watch a trial (which sounds like the Casey Anthony trial). They stay with her Aunt Ida, who is a lot hotter than the name suggests. She gets them involved in robbing a gun convention. Bill gets caught, and finds out his wife and Aunt Ida have been having a lesbian affair.
He gets sentenced to jail, is paroled, and swears vengeance on Ida. He teams up with a floozy he meets at a halfway house and heads to Mexico (not before finding out his now grown daughter is a stripper, of course). He finds Ida, but in a ludicrous conclusion that involves a woman trying to resurrect her dead Nazi grandfather.
Somewhere in there is a decent noir story, but Woods just can't write very well. He has some very tortured metaphors: "I had as much appetite as a boa constrictor that, while warming himself on the tarmac, had been run over by an freight truck." And Woods write sex scenes that are very juvenile. They sound like bad Penthouse Letters (and I've written hundreds of those). I mean, "I grabbed that snatch"? One should never use the word snatch as a reference to female genitalia. Never.
But beyond that, the writing is amateurish. Consider this gem: "A warning flare burst aloft in my head. An image of the great white in Jaws rose out of the deep waters of my id. Aunt Ida was mucho dangerous!" Hoo boy.
So I'm glad I didn't waste too much money on this. When I read books like this I get a little depressed, wondering how he gets it published when I can't. I know I can write a better book than this (and have).
December 29, 2017
Reviewed for Library Journal, September 30, 2016.
Bill Derringer, a Yale dropout with two tours of duty in Iraq and a stint in a mental hospital, is bored out of his mind. Currently on unpaid furlough from his civilian job, he and his wife, Edie, decide to road trip it to Florida to visit her Aunt Ida in Orlando. After a few drunken evenings, resulting in a renewed love affair between Edie and Ida, the three decide to rip off a local gun and ammo show. Their ill-conceived heist fails, leaving the two women on the run and Derringer behind bars. After serving his time, he ends up at a halfway house where he teams up with Jane, who shares his sociopathic tendencies. The two embark on a big score of their own: to retrieve a suitcase once owned by Beat writer William Burroughs. Their madcap adventure serendipitously leads them to the despised Aunt Ida and a whole host of outrageous characters and events.
Verdict: Woods (A Death in Mexico) delivers a jumpy and sexually explicit tale that never quite hits its stride, much like its protagonist. Exploring locales from Florida to Mexico, as well as the dark ruminations of its antihero, this title might be handed to readers who like their noir with a side of vulgar.—Amy Nolan, St. Joseph, MI
Bill Derringer, a Yale dropout with two tours of duty in Iraq and a stint in a mental hospital, is bored out of his mind. Currently on unpaid furlough from his civilian job, he and his wife, Edie, decide to road trip it to Florida to visit her Aunt Ida in Orlando. After a few drunken evenings, resulting in a renewed love affair between Edie and Ida, the three decide to rip off a local gun and ammo show. Their ill-conceived heist fails, leaving the two women on the run and Derringer behind bars. After serving his time, he ends up at a halfway house where he teams up with Jane, who shares his sociopathic tendencies. The two embark on a big score of their own: to retrieve a suitcase once owned by Beat writer William Burroughs. Their madcap adventure serendipitously leads them to the despised Aunt Ida and a whole host of outrageous characters and events.
Verdict: Woods (A Death in Mexico) delivers a jumpy and sexually explicit tale that never quite hits its stride, much like its protagonist. Exploring locales from Florida to Mexico, as well as the dark ruminations of its antihero, this title might be handed to readers who like their noir with a side of vulgar.—Amy Nolan, St. Joseph, MI
September 10, 2019
I stumbled upon this book (and author) recently and I hope to stumble upon more of his books and short stories. Wow!! What a wild ride. Bill Derringer is an Iraq veteran (and Yale dropout). His wife and aunt left him with a gigantic legal problem and after years in prison? He decides to get revenge, but that is not easy especially when there are crazy people who want to kill you, supposedly help you, save your soul and travel with you to exotic and dangerous places to help find something you are looking for.
I loved this book. IT is not for the feint of heart. It's in your face tough pulp fiction. The characters are great (and very flawed) and the grit and the grime and the sexuality and the violence fits perfectly as it is a well written and great book that I recommend highly.
Why isn't this book a movie on Netflix or a series on Netflix? I have no idea why, but it sure should be and I would to read another book with Bill Derringer and his misadventures.
Five stars. Loved it.
I loved this book. IT is not for the feint of heart. It's in your face tough pulp fiction. The characters are great (and very flawed) and the grit and the grime and the sexuality and the violence fits perfectly as it is a well written and great book that I recommend highly.
Why isn't this book a movie on Netflix or a series on Netflix? I have no idea why, but it sure should be and I would to read another book with Bill Derringer and his misadventures.
Five stars. Loved it.
January 10, 2017
I would like to describe Woods' novel in its own lurid language, but I doubt I could maintain the flow of outrageous similes and lubricious detail. Although Woods remains at his best in more tightly controlled short stories, this wild ride from Florida to the Yucatan provides all the jolts and twists of a rickety wooden roller coaster you should have known better than to get on in the first place. Once you commit, just sit back, enjoy the thrills, enjoy the scenery that consists mostly of sleazy bars and hotels and women spilling out of their clothes. (I don't think any female character is introduced wearing a top or pants that are not several sizes too small for her.)
Woods' writing is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.
Woods' writing is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.
February 22, 2018
Bill Derringer is an Iraq war veteran who is having trouble making ends meet. When he and his wife Edie take their two kids to visit Edie’s Aunt Ida, she turns out to be a lot more than Bill had bargained for and things soon spiral wildly out of control.
Jonathan Woods’ ‘Kiss The Devil Goodnight‘ is a lethal cocktail of pulp fiction and Beat poetry. It’s vibrant, violent and vivid. Lyrical and and lurid. Fast moving and funny. ‘Kiss The Devil Goodnight’ is chock-full of great lines and powerful imagery, and is certainly not for those of a delicate sensibility. I loved it.
Jonathan Woods’ ‘Kiss The Devil Goodnight‘ is a lethal cocktail of pulp fiction and Beat poetry. It’s vibrant, violent and vivid. Lyrical and and lurid. Fast moving and funny. ‘Kiss The Devil Goodnight’ is chock-full of great lines and powerful imagery, and is certainly not for those of a delicate sensibility. I loved it.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews