Synopsis:
Eli Lamp is a broken man. An ex-detective, ex-addict, and long-grieving father whose daughter, Hannah, disappeared a decade before, Eli decimated his old life investigating her abduction and is now indebted to the Crooked Wheel, a local drug gang, as an enforcer. But when the son of the Crooked Wheel’s boss is viciously murdered, Eli is met with a simple demand: Find out who killed him and your debt to the Wheel is clear forever. You’re free. This pursuit brings him into the orbit of Avery Bryant, Hannah’s best friend and the last person to see her before she went missing. Soon, Eli and Avery are entwined in a hunt for answers that spans decades and brings churning to the surface a conspiracy linking not only these current tragedies, but the buried sorrows of Eli’s past. And though none of them dare say the word “witch,” at least not out loud, something lurks in the woods, bent-backed and black-eyed, clawed and vengeful, looming ever closer. . . .
Review:
Yet another hard, fast, blinding punch to the face of a novel from Rosson, “Crone,” is a book that will lodge itself in your nail beds and slip into your bloodstream. Bleak enough to make the average noir look fluffy, “Crone,” is a particularly wretched entry into the expanding Rosson-verse, with its terminally run-down town, gang rivalries, bent coppers and ‘wire’ addicts…and something other. A witch book like no other I have come across, the titular crone is raw, ugly, feral and primal, a stellar borderline-creature-feature that feels particularly unfair following “Coffin Moon,” which I maintain has the best vampire since George R.R Martin’s “Fevre Dream.” Speaking of, whilst you may have gone in with high expectations in terms of brutality and break-neck pacing if you’ve read anything from Rosson before, “Crone,” remains a shockingly grim, gritty and utterly unputdownable beast, with some rather grotesque goings-on that you won’t soon forget. A magnificently nasty novel that should be chased with a stiff drink, this one is out September 22nd from Black Crow in the UK and Penguin Random House across the pond.
Eli Lamp’s entire existence has gone to shit, quite frankly. He reached rock bottom, only for a trap door to open underneath him. Once a detective and a father, and now, since the disappearance of his daughter Hannah, instead a recovering addict and reluctant enforcer for the Crooked Wheel gang, things are pretty terrible, but at least consistently so. That is until Dave Novak’s son is murdered and Eli’s carefully maintained disaster of a life is booted down another flight of stairs. Dave tells him that should he get to the bottom of this, and bring him the culprit his debt will be cleared, and with what Novak has on him, what choice does he have anyway? But this is nothing like anything Eli came across in all of his years as a detective, not a routine gangland execution or a mugging gone awry- something bizarre, something unnatural is clearly at play, and it looks like, on top of his freedom, Eli might get some long sought after answers.
Eli, like a lot of Rosson’s protagonists, is a rough around the edges, but fundamentally empathetic fellow. His backstory is one that breaks our hearts, and whilst he is of course responsible for the unenviable position his grief and anger and wounded masculinity has landed him in, we ache for him nontheless. All of Rosson’s characters, even the bad ones, have a complexity to them, with a rare and unredeeming but beautifully done glimpse of vulnerability and humanity from even the likes of Dave Novak- and as I say, the quasi creature feature is quality too. Rosson’s beautiful character work is what elevates this whole grim enterprise from good pulp into something rich, complex and emotionally devastating.
Rosson writes plenty about addiction, whether subtly, in the background, like in “Fever House,” or more explicitly- like here. I found one of the most disturbing aspects of the novel to be “wire,” which is invasive and ravenous and has some pretty disturbing side-effects. Rosson writes these scenes with a clammy, skin-crawling detail- it’s fearlessly done. Whilst incredibly graphic, unflinching in depicting the violence and degradation of body and mind caused by the drug, Rosson remains compassionate, refusing to reduce addicts to staggering props, instead acknowledging the link between substance abuse and trauma. Addiction is neither romanticised nor flattened into something morally punishing, it is simply another kind of horror.
“Crone,” will hit you like a barbed-wire-wrapped brick. It’s a viscerally unpleasant, intensely bleak read that will have you asking how things can get worse, before enthusiastically showing you. That said, it’s also a novel that in the face of multiple murders, various gangs, corruption and addiction and poverty, somehow manages not to lose sight of humanity. I would read terms and conditions if Keith Rosson wrote them.
Leave a Reply