All You Direct - Book Reviews

By Charlie Huston

As the Stephen King blurb (”blistering, unputdownable”) on the cover of “The Shotgun Rule” (Ballantine, $21.95) suggests, Charlie Huston is a monstrously gifted purveyor of suspense and mayhem. Readers of his Henry Thompson trilogy and his ongoing series of Joe Pitt vampire novels are well aware of his knack for pumping new blood — literally, and by the bucket load — into the well-worn pulp and horror genres.

But “The Shotgun Rules,” his first standalone book, is something else entirely: a story of wayward youth, stolen bicycles and drug deals gone bad grounded in a realistic setting — working-class, small-town Northern California, circa 1983 — that robs its characters of the protective armor of genre.

Which isn’t to say the aimless teens Huston portrays here don’t see themselves as tough-guy characters. From the start, George, Hector, Andy and Paul toss around epithets as if they were auditioning for a stoner version of “Slap Shot.” It’s always clear to the reader, and maybe the characters themselves, that this is a performance of a sort. But when the knives and guns start slicing away and going bang — as they always do in a Huston novel — the masks drop, to moving effect.

As is often the case, the book’s slow accretion of dread is more compelling than the terrible violence that inevitably follows, no matter how ingeniously Huston has choreographed it. And despite the fact that these characters are “realer” than Henry Thompson or Joe Pitt, Huston crams too many of them — four teens, four villains, three parents, one messed-up aunt and one heroic bungler — into 248 pages for any one of them to come as fully alive as Thompson and Pitt do, their genre trappings notwithstanding.

But Stephen King doesn’t lie. This book raised blisters on my fingers — and I still couldn’t put it down.