Cheap Thrills

by David Kloepfer

Cheap Thrills takes place over the course of a single weekend, beginning with the incessantly stoned Ethan and his roommate Phil discovering the body of their weed dealer in a Vancouver alley alongside a box of porno magazines and crime noir paperbacks. Tasked by his eccentric boss with locating the money the dealer had been carrying, gang member Wynne Duncan is led to the two roommates. But things don't add up--for anybody. Cheap Thrills is about Vancouver, weed, lust, crime stories, a missing bag of money, an American conspiracy to invade Canada, and the death of a drug smuggler. It is a paranoid crime-noir love story, where the love is unreciprocated and the noir is mostly in the mind.

216 pages, Paperback

Published October 15, 2019

About the author

I know jiu jitsu.

Reviews

[Adam McPhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was great. Vancouver noir that's at once gritty and darkly funny.

I really liked the novel-within-a-novel aspect and the references to a fictional video game series called Danger Close, a sort of Call of Duty set in various Canadian cities and dealing with American and Mexican cartel invasion scenarios. Both the novel and the fictional media universe within make you wish there was more Canadian genre fiction and less Vancouver-as-New York.

At first I kept comparing this mentally to Pineapple Express, I guess because of all the weed stuff (it's set before legalization), but by the end I decided it was much closer in lineage to Snatch, a comedy of errors set in the criminal underworld.

[Chuk · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was fun and had lots of local colour (some of which was obviously made up for story purposes, like burger chains that don't exist in real life and fake exit numbers on the Trans Canada). Kind of reminded me of Elmore Leonard in some ways, plus there's a meta-book aspect where there are lots of excerpts from a novel one of the characters is reading that has the same title as this novel. Has a frequently humorous style even though a lot of the events are definitely not very funny, and everything comes together at the end.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very cool noir novel set in Vancouver. Witty, funny dialogue, engaging characters and an ending that wraps everything up nicely. Some interesting story with in a story aspects as well. I really enjoyed it.