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The Good and the Ghastly: A Novel ReviewUsually when someone contacts me via email about reading their book, they give me a description of it and I say sure, send it, or no that's not for me. And usually, if the description includes a phrase like "gangster noir epic set a thousand years into the future." I'll pass because, well, that's just not for me, in most cases. Usually, the name on the book is not James Boice. I said it once, when I reviewed NoVA, and I'll repeat it here: I don't know why this guy doesn't get more attention.
The Good and the Ghastly is as described in that email. Set in 3348, after the war and the nuclear destruction, after 1000 years of crawling back to a time that reflects our own. Bits of ancient history seep through the years - the great leaders and artists who stand tall throughout the centuries - Alexander the Great, Bob Dylan, Sarah Palin. Thank god Visa is there to hold everything together.
Junior Alvarez grows up in the fractured gangland of Visa NoVA with a God complex, a bad temper, and a will to act violently and decisively against his foes. In a massive teenage gangfight, he beats a boy to death, and the boy's mother starts a never-ending campaign against Junior - first through legal means, and the via a systematic vigilante attack on the gang system.
Junior is the real story here, though. He rises from an anger-fueled street thug, unwelcome (frustratingly so for JR) through the front door of the highest establishments, to a meticulously organized lieutenant masquerading as a community benefactor, to mob boss, sometimes through deception and sometimes through violence. It's a rise familiar to the modern reader or filmgoer - think The Departed, or Heat, or Billy Bathgate with something of a steampunk sensiblity.
Junior is a great character. He's despicable from a young age, seducing minors and busting heads. He believes he is destined for greatness and the shame he feels at his back-door status is palpable and the motivation for the swath of violence he unleashes.
Whereas NoVA was reserved and pointed, viewing suburbia from multiple angles, The Good and the Ghastly is a detached view of a killer, with all his charms and warts, building an empire and chased Javert-like by feds and vigilantes.
James Boice is as good as ever here. He doesn't let the dystopian satire get in the way of the story, relieving me of one of my personal annoyances. He's gritty and reflective, twistedly funny, and his sentences are as sharp as ever. A fearless, unrepentant book of a fearsome future - The Good and the Ghastly will be released by Scribner on 6/14/11.
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The Good and the Ghastly: A Novel OverviewFrom a young author who has been compared to Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Pahlaniuk, comes a gangster noir epic set a thousand years into the future.It's the thirty-fourth century andthe nuclear apocalypse has come and gone. Civilization has rebuilt itself, andthe results are eerily similar to the early part of the twenty-first century.But there are a few notable differences. Visa owns everything. Deer are themost common domesticated animal. And misinterpretations of pre-apocalyptichistory run amuck (e.g. Palin established the theory of natural selection). But what hasn't changed is the nature of good and evil. The Good and theGhastly centers around two people linked throughviolence. Mobster Junior Alvarez has risen from childstreet thug to criminal overlord. He is a reprehensible man who will go toincredible lengths to get what he wants--power--and he desires to live however hepleases, without compromise. The intensity of his quest is matched only by thatof the middle-aged mother of one of Alvarez's first victims. She has gonevigilante and is hunting down mobsters. The two are willing to go to the endsof the earth to manifest their wills--one good, one ghastly, both ruthless.A wildsatire of our own society, The Good andthe Ghastly is a visceral novel informed with Boice's unnerving sense ofreality and pathology. It is also an honest, old-fashioned, good-versus-evilstory--with a twist of modern-day madness.
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