Status Updates From Dread Journey

This is wonderfully claustrophobic and menacing but laced with a cloying decadence that makes it hard not to disdain all the characters.

"Strength was returning to her. She must have strength for what she was to do. Not because she condoned. Because despite the sins, and his were heavy, love was changeless."

Audiobook

"Man had destroyed man, not only in his body but in his soul. Man was no longer large enough to defy. He was a monotonous tick-tack in a cosmic assembly line. He had forgotten that Good was an absolute. He believed in evil and not evil, but he no longer had knowledge of Good."

"To her the most bitter cup was to be cut away from life. To lose this amber hair, this crimson mouth, this molten flesh; to receive in its place the cold ash of oblivion."

"He had no outward aspects of success but no inner properties of failure. He didn’t seem to care about anything."

I’m startled by how sophisticated and contemporary this feels. It reads like a post-Me-Too novel in its undertanding and acceptance of the exploitative misogyny of Hollywood. The observations are acute. The people feel real. Ubiquitous poverty sets the context for the obsecenly large movie business salaries. The train porter, who would have been mostly invisible in a Christie novel is a well-rounded character.

Dorothy B. Hughes is probably the most underrated mystery writer of all time and one of the greatest to ever do it.

Her sheer intensity is unmatched for her era and she remains one of my most recommended writers as the prose is sophisticated enough to please the "intellectuals" and she strikes a balance of that sophistication with atmosphere, readability, and excitement.

Glorious noir suspense thriller.