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A review by ridgewaygirl
Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto
4.0
You're here because it's somewhere. Dogs pant in the streets. Beer won't stay cold. The last new song you liked came out a long, long time ago, and the radio never plays it anymore.
If you like your crime novels dark, you won't find many darker than this. Roy Cady is a mob enforcer in New Orleans. He'll rough guys up, or more, for his boss, Stan. The day a doctor shows him a picture of his lungs, filled with what look like snow flurries, is the day his girlfriend moves up and starts dating his boss. Then Stan sends him on an errand to scare a guy, with the odd instruction to not carry any weapons with him. It's enough to save his life when the job turns out to be a set-up, and then a bloodbath. With the exception of a teen-age hooker, he's the only one living by the time the bullets have stopped flying.
He takes the girl, Rocky, along as he leaves Louisiana, and she convinces him to stop by her old home in East Texas for a moment. Before long, he's holed up in a run-down motel in Galveston with Rocky and her three-year-old sister in the room next door.
"What's the matter with her, then? Having a little one like this. What's wrong with her?"
"I can't really say. You know how it is. Some people. Something happens to them. Usually when they're young. And they never get any better."
"But some do."
"I guess. You tend to meet more of the other kind, though."
This isn't one of those cheerful ending type books. Everybody's damaged and Roy, the closest thing to a good guy Pizzolatto provides, isn't very good at all. But the author reminds the reader that there's a reason that people are the way they are, that not everybody's as resilient as they need to be to survive. The tension in the story never lets up, even when we know who might have made it out. Pizzolatto's writing perfectly suits the mood and tempo of the story he's written. I'll be waiting for his next book.
You're born and forty years later you hobble out of a bar, startled by your own aches. Nobody knows you. You steer down lightless highways, and you invent a destination because movement is key. So you head toward the last thing you have left to lose, with no real idea what you're going to do with it.
If you like your crime novels dark, you won't find many darker than this. Roy Cady is a mob enforcer in New Orleans. He'll rough guys up, or more, for his boss, Stan. The day a doctor shows him a picture of his lungs, filled with what look like snow flurries, is the day his girlfriend moves up and starts dating his boss. Then Stan sends him on an errand to scare a guy, with the odd instruction to not carry any weapons with him. It's enough to save his life when the job turns out to be a set-up, and then a bloodbath. With the exception of a teen-age hooker, he's the only one living by the time the bullets have stopped flying.
He takes the girl, Rocky, along as he leaves Louisiana, and she convinces him to stop by her old home in East Texas for a moment. Before long, he's holed up in a run-down motel in Galveston with Rocky and her three-year-old sister in the room next door.
"What's the matter with her, then? Having a little one like this. What's wrong with her?"
"I can't really say. You know how it is. Some people. Something happens to them. Usually when they're young. And they never get any better."
"But some do."
"I guess. You tend to meet more of the other kind, though."
This isn't one of those cheerful ending type books. Everybody's damaged and Roy, the closest thing to a good guy Pizzolatto provides, isn't very good at all. But the author reminds the reader that there's a reason that people are the way they are, that not everybody's as resilient as they need to be to survive. The tension in the story never lets up, even when we know who might have made it out. Pizzolatto's writing perfectly suits the mood and tempo of the story he's written. I'll be waiting for his next book.
You're born and forty years later you hobble out of a bar, startled by your own aches. Nobody knows you. You steer down lightless highways, and you invent a destination because movement is key. So you head toward the last thing you have left to lose, with no real idea what you're going to do with it.