Author, Beaird Glover, sent me an e-copy of his novel Syd & Marcy.

Description from Goodreads:
Marcy practices to be a great actor, but she isn’t pretending to kill people. Is the murder an audition for Hollywood, or is it reality? When a ruthless detective is pitted against two self-centered scammers on the lam, it’s hard to tell whose side to be on. A femme fatale and her boyfriend are too wild to trust, but they just don’t know any better. According to the Old South, they must be punished. The frenetic ride takes off that is not only Syd and Marcy’s escape from Memphis to the backwoods of Mississippi—it’s also a darkly comedic escape to Southern Gen X nihilism in a black Mustang on a dark road getting darker. Featuring a conflict between the Old South and the New, and written in a facile and succinct prose, Syd and Marcy spirals frankly through the realities and illusions of a culture on the rails.

Review:
This is a hard book to sum up, but please cue the Nine Inch Nails and then fade into the banjos. This book is Natural Born Killers, meets Deliverance, with a slap dash of Holmes and Watson thrown in for good measure. It’s dark, gristly, violent and sometimes painfully uncomfortable to read. If it weren’t for the humour used to break up the disquietude I don’t know if it would even be tolerable. There’s sexual abuse, incest, human bondage, drug use, alcoholism, bigotry, racism, violence, violence, and more violence. There’s poverty, ignorance, social/economic inequality and a severe lack of formal education. But there’s also a seed of hope apparent in Syd and Marcy’s love for one another, Marcy’s concern for her younger sister, and Blaine’s willingness to be flexible. It’s well worth picking up.

In a sense the book reads a bit like a cautionary tale of cyclical violence and perpetual victimhood. Everyone is crazy. Everyone is hurting. Everyone is just trying to make do and everyone is essentially failing. Blaine is just about the only person who even remotely has his shit together here and even he has a crumbling marriage, rather lackadaisical attitude toward his job, and is sitting on a political powder keg. On the other hand there are a few gems of interpersonal understanding. Syd’s empathy for Marcy’s circumstance, behaviours and other ‘issues’ almost makes him a psychological genius. It’s also a little bit touching. Unrepentant murder he may be, but I couldn’t help liking him…a lot.

I believe the Quentin Tarantino comparison has been made in previous reviews, but it’s apt. Not only because of the extreme and often unexpected violence, but also because of the thread of dark humour left in it’s wake. Imagine if Q.T. took a swipe at doing a remake of Lord of the Flies…scary huh? And while Lord of the Flies might seem like an odd comparison to make, since no one is stranded on an island and almost everyone is old enough to be considered an adult, I think it does actually make sense.

Like Golding’s classic exploration into the precarious balance between humans’ natural inclination to dominate over others and to settle into structured civility as well as the fluid nature of personal morality, Glover’s work presents the reader with psychotic killers you can relate to, crooked cops saving the innocent at the expense of other innocents, and abhorrent abuse at he hands of perpetrators who probably had no better chance in life than their victims. It’s hard to know exactly where the moral line should be drawn. But they’re all still just normal people in abnormal circumstance, much like Piggy, Ralph, Jack and the rest were just normal boys before finding themselves alone and unobserved in the wild. Even more frightening is the unspoken inference that all of this could be happening anywhere near you, at anytime if you just chose to look a little deeper. These are the people who fall through the cracks and are ignored by society’s invisible rule abiders, that would be us sheep BTW.  [I didn’t mean that to sound anywhere near as pretentious as it does on a second read, but the comparison still stands.]

It’s hard not to root for Syd and Marcy even as they made bad choice after bad choice, even as they killed and unintentionally tempted others into making similarly morally repugnant choices, leading to more disastrous circumstance. It’s hard to condemn two such guileless killers. They left chaos behind them wherever they went, but had no real ill-intent. It’s this dissonance between the reader’s emotional response to the characters and the logical brain’s advised response to them that makes this such and interesting read. Or at least that’s how I felt about it.