Read: Pistol Poets by Victor Gischler,
Good, a quick and fun read. Lots of violent death with normal people mixing with unrepentant scumbags; always a good combination. More comedy than violence. I'll check out another one by him today.
Itinerant writing professor and poet Jay Morgan takes a one year contract at Eastern Oklahoma University. Morgan teaches a grad student poetry workshop that includes a redneck, a pretentious twit, and a thug from East St. Louis who is assuming the identity of a dead scholarship student. Trouble ensues when Morgan's most recent student sex partner overdoses while asleep in Morgan's bed. A mysterious and wealthy old guy with a backlog of poetry assists in disposing of the body. Poetry workshop students team together to sell East St. Louis cocaine and get in shootouts. Plenty of shooting, sex, bad poetry, drunkenness, fistfights, academic sloth, academic stupidity, lying, deception, Jerzy Kosinski references.
Gischler uses a lot of characters but each one is well done. He succinctly fleshes them out through the novel. Some comic novels tend to pack in plenty of kooky and weird characters for laughs - reference most any novel set in Miami. Maybe these guys are weird and kooky too, but after growing up in a university town these people seem normal to me.
Plenty of brief discussion about poetry and the terror, torture and pain of bad poetry. There is a poem or two done by the mysterious old guy that were really neat.
I've read three Gischler and I'm noticing some Gischler staples: Lots of booze, coffee, new sexual relationships (older guy and younger girl in 2 out of 3), no technical gun-nerd, car-nerd, or other-nerd stuff with overdone details and descriptions of hardware, everyman protagonists (2 of 3), race and culture differences straight forwardly dealt with - race not an issue except when a character mistakenly thinks it is (I'm not sure on that description. I'd have to ponder it.)
I hear that Victor Gischler smells like scotch and mothballs.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I mixed scotch and moth balls ONCE when trying to invent a new drink, and now I'll never hear the end of it.
VG
Post a Comment