Noir fiction for the modern reader.

FLORIDA GOTHIC STORIES by Vicki Hendricks

Review by Mike Dennis

You really have to hand it to Vicki Hendricks.  I mean, there are damn few authors out there who would even be willing to consider short story subjects such as Siamese twins or bestiality.  Fewer still would ever actually attempt such stories, and I daresay that only Hendricks can pull them off without making the reader feel like he should be reading them under the covers with a flashlight.

That pretty much sums up the caveat of Florida Gothic Stories (Kitsune Books, 2010), a superb collection of intense short tales, most of which have been separately published elsewhere, but are now together in one volume behind a properly creepy cover. Hendricks, an outstanding noir fiction author of several Florida-based novels, has stepped somewhat outside the comfort zone of her genre, and believe me, the reader will be glad she did.

These stories run the gamut from straight noir to the utterly bizarre. Lethal strippers, trailer park crackers, drug whores, animals in various relationships with humans…all fodder for Hendricks’ fertile imagination. Let’s face it. You know you’re in foreign territory when a story begins with the line, “The day he flushed his meds and purchased a dress for his iguana, Gregory Waxman’s real problems were over.”

All the characters in this collection are infused with a certain desperation, a kind of melancholy beneath their outer personae and, no matter how twisted they are, the reader can feel Hendricks’ devotion to them. She treats them with a tenderness which you might not initially think they deserve, but upon reflection, you’ll ultimately get on board. That’s really the beauty of these stories: they’re not meant to be swallowed in one or two bites and then quickly digested. They require the reader subsequently to think about them, each one, each character, and in this afterglow, their true nature is revealed.

For example, the leadoff tale, Stormy, Mon Amour, immediately slaps the reader with the notion of sex between the central character and Stormy the dolphin. It takes a minute to realize that it’s not a joke, that this has actually happened, and then, once Hendricks has you reeled in to the reality of it, she then convinces you that this is in fact a traditional love story. When it’s all over, you realize that you were reading this in exactly the same fashion as a housewife might watch a daytime soap opera: pulling for the heroine, hissing the villain, and praying for a happily-ever-after ending.

Even a standard noir tale like Boozanne, Lemme Be, gets the Hendricks odd-angle treatment. Mouse, a four-foot-ten, minor-league burglar, has figured out a way to live in the home of Bob and Melodie, a married suburban couple, without their knowing about it. He soon teams up with Boozanne, a fleshy, pig-nosed grifter girl, but after living in the couple’s house for a while, he develops an unusual affinity not for Boozanne, but for Melodie, whom he has never really seen, much less met.

All the stories are set in Florida, of course, Hendricks’ own stomping grounds. As she does in her novels, she plunges the reader into these settings as sharply as she does her players. You will walk the terrain hand-in-hand with these characters, and feel the sweat dripping off them as they plod through sticky summer days and long, dangerous nights. However unpleasant these people may be, Hendricks keeps you right at their side, and you’ll always know you’re in Florida. As a former Floridian (Key West), I can appreciate this authenticity.

Florida Gothic Stories may mark a slight departure for Vicki Hendricks, but don’t be fooled. These plots are original, the characters breathe, and her ear for dialogue is unerring. You can’t ask for anything more than that.

Not too long ago, I was trolling around the blogs and forums and I landed on the Kindle Board Writer’s Café. On this day, there was a question that caught my eye regarding the proper amount of backstory and description to put in the front of a novel before getting down to the business of moving the plot forward.

I don’t know, it seems pretty obvious to me that you have to involve the reader immediately. You can’t waste a lot of time with exposition and backstory. But I was shocked not only at the question, but at the responses as well.

Now, I was well aware that these were overwhelmingly self-pubbed/Kindle writers, but the number of people who tried to delineate exactly where in the novel the action should begin was appalling. One said that it’s OK to postpone the “gripping stuff” until at least 1/4 to 1/3 of the way into the book. Another said the first 1/3 of the book “should” be exposition. Where are they getting this from? Can somebody tell me? Surely not anywhere in the real world. Maybe in some “creative” writing class somewhere.

To be fair, though, several respondents insisted on getting the action going right away. And of course, that’s pretty much where I stand.

Naturally, this doesn’t mean a high body count in the first paragraph or laying out the entire story on page one. But it does mean that if a central character is introduced right away, and right away he/she faces conflict, or at the very least, some sort of tension, well, the writer is probably on the right path. If this conflict is well-presented, the reader will want to turn the page.

In addition, I think it’s a good idea (notice I didn’t say “rule”) for the writer to continue ratcheting up this tension on the central character as the novel progresses. Holding the reader is of paramount importance in the first few chapters of any book, and one proven way to do this is to escalate the conflict. This would ideally be done in every scene.

Backstory and info-dumps are a bad idea in the opening of any book. Agents and editors specifically look for that as evidence that a writer doesn’t know what he/she is doing. Better that stuff be skillfully woven into the dialogue and narrative as the book moves along.

How to do it?

Well, therein lies the challenge.

We interrupt this highbrow blog to bring you the following important announcement:

My noir novel, The Take, will be released soon. I know, I know, that’s what I said a year ago. But I was just kidding then. Now when I say it, I really mean it. It really will be released soon.

It’s a novel of human desperation, set in a world where only the cop cars are black and white. Everything else swirls in a kind of gray soup, without any way of knowing who can be trusted or what awaits around the next corner.

When I get a firm date from the publisher, I’ll post it here.

We now return you to our regular programming.

Dorchester, one of the country’s leading publishers of romance novels, has announced that they’re eliminating their print division and will publish in the digital format exclusively.

This is huge.

Following a 25% drop in sales (their figures), they’ve decided to make the leap. Very good. Very forward-thinking. They’re right out there on the cutting edge. BUT…

If they charge $7.99 for their ebooks, they’ll find very little success.

Here’s my take on it.

It looks like their thinking runs this way: “Well, let’s cut out all our expenses involved with print books–you know, all that ink and paper and shipping and stuff–and let’s just shovel digital books into the e-world. It costs nothing to ship! With our expenses slashed, we’ll make a ton of money.” This, of course, fully assumes that readers will pay as much for an ebook as they will for a mass market paperback.

This is the kind of thinking that often paralyzes corporate America.

The people who made this decision certainly realize it’s a big leap. Therefore, their primary instinct is to cover themselves. To insulate themselves from blame in case something goes wrong and their corporate higher-ups, who I imagine in Dorchester’s case would be their board of directors, start looking for heads to chop off.

In order to properly create this ass-covering, they no doubt prepared lots of fancy charts and slide shows indicating the growing popularity of e-readers, Amazon e-tail figures, steadily declining hardback sales, and so on. So in the midst of all the dogs and ponies, they slip in the $7.99 number without any evidence whatsoever that it might be the optimum price.

And certainly without any evidence that there could well be a consumer revolt against paying the same price for an ebook as they would for a paperback.

Problem is, they’re afraid to take the final step that might really bail them out. Namely, presenting their product at a competitive price. Afraid because, remember, they have to cover themselves, and a $2.99 price leaves them no cover at all.

I mean, you can’t sell a novel by an established author for $2.99. We’re getting over $25 for a hardcover right now! $2.99 is what all those wannabes sell theirs at, right? “Real” authors and publishers can’t stoop that low, right? Besides, we’ve still got expenses, right? Even after the original slashfest. We’ve got editors, office space, utilities, management people, marketing people (wait a minute, aren’t authors supposed to do their own marketing now?). So we have to charge $7.99 per book, right? Right?

I’d be willing to bet money that, during their meeting when this change was approved, nobody made any mention at all about the rising trend of established writers self-pubbing their own material on Kindle and making money at it. They’re continuing to live under the myth that all self-pubbed books are crap and beneath contempt. So for a New York publisher to get into the cesspool with self-pubbed authors would just be incomprehensible. Oh, the humanity!

Of course, now that I think about it, even if they deigned to sell my ebook for $2.99, would they give me a 70% royalty?

So then, apart from editing and a cover, which I can farm out to indie editors and artists, what can they do for me that justifies their giving me anything less than 70%?

Hmmmmm.

By the way, my rock & roll novel, Cadillac’s Comin’, a hard tale of a rockabilly one-hit wonder who recorded for Sun Records in the 1950s, is up on Kindle for $2.99.

But wait! There’s more!

It’s now on Smashwords for only $1.99. That’s right. You read it correctly. Only $1.99! So you don’t forget, order before midnight tomorrow.

Writing this post has, for me, been a long time coming. Twenty years to be exact. And I’m still not doing it justice.

But here goes anyway.

The other day, I was browsing around my friendly neighborhood Barnes & Noble and I came across a trade paperback copy of Homeboy by Seth Morgan. I was stunned, yet thrilled, to see it still in print.

I met Seth back around 1990, when we were both living in New Orleans. I was playing piano in a rock & roll piano bar and he was about to do his first signing session for Homeboy. Oddly, the signing took place at a store called the Abstract Book Shop, about as far from B&N-world as you can possibly get. It was a funky little spot way out of the way in a semi-bad part of town. You could go in there and find The Daily Worker right next to writings by Jesse Helms. Even more oddly, the place was owned and operated by a federal appellate judge!

Anyway, that’s where I met him and he signed my hardcover copy, and included a little inscription. I told him what I did for a living and that I was just getting into writing. I had completed my first novel and Seth was kind enough to look it over. He was very encouraging and what’s more, he liked the fact that a Bourbon Street musician would pick up the pen. We became friends.

And that’s when I learned of his dark side.

Turns out Seth was a ne’er-do-well as a youth. Raised in a wealthy New York family who expected him to toe the elitist line, he attended, and was expelled from, many of the best private schools on the East Coast and in Europe. He wound up in San Francisco, living off his trust fund. This was the swingin’ sixties, so…enter drugs. He eventually graduated from a ne’er-do-well to a real badass.

He acquired a serious jones which not even his trust fund could support, so he turned to crime. He confessed to me that he’d committed over 400 armed robberies to feed his insatiable habit. During this period, he fell in with Janis Joplin, becoming her “boyfriend”. Together, they marauded through the blazing world of Bay Area booze and drugs right on up to her death from an overdose in 1970.

Back on the armed robbery front, he finally got caught and was sentenced to hard time at Vacaville State Penitentiary in California. It was during this period that he took up writing.

In 1978, he won the PEN American Prisoners’ Writing Contest, jumpstarting his writing career. In the late 1980s, he came to New Orleans to write Homeboy, which consumed nearly two years of his life. New Orleans was his city of choice because he felt if he could resist the temptations of drugs and alcohol there, he could resist them anywhere. Once his novel was completed, he got himself an agent and before you could say, “Closed to submissions”, it was picked up by Random House.

His harsh, neon style of writing electrified the literary world at the time. Reviews uniformly gushed with praise. The publisher couldn’t take out enough ads. The New York Times loved him. He appeared on all the morning television shows. They were calling him the next Steinbeck. At 41, this former trust fund baby / drug addict / ex-con’s career was soaring.

The novel was released worldwide, so he went to Europe for signings. While in London, his father came to see him. For Seth, this was to be his long-awaited day of redemption, the day on which his dad puts a hand on his shoulder and says, “Good job, son.”

Instead, his father was cold and critical, crushing Seth’s hopes for ever pleasing him.

He returned to New Orleans and resumed his drug ways, snorting cocaine and consorting with lowlifes. I became the only friend he had in the straight world. He still came to hear me play, and we still talked about writing, but he was clearly more sullen than I’d ever known him to be.

Then one day, I went over to the Abstract Book Shop, where I’d become friends with the owner/federal appellate judge. He told me that Seth had been killed at around four o’clock that morning in a motorcycle accident. He had a girl with him who was also killed, and that cocaine had been found on both their bodies.

I immediately went to his house on Camp Street, an old-line New Orleans two-story job, right out of the early 20th century. My goal was to rescue whatever artifacts of his I could. But I learned I wasn’t the first one there.

The place had been ransacked. His scumbag drug buddies had beaten me to it. I looked around the house for something, anything meaningful that could be saved. I saw his desktop computer sitting out in the open. Grabbing it and a few 5 1/4″ floppies splayed around it, along with his passport, I headed home.

I slipped the disks into my computer and discovered the first few chapters of his second novel, Mambo Mephiste, which he had described to me as a “great big Mardi Gras novel”. In the last few weeks of his life, this book was his only source of excitement. He was clearly committed to turning out a masterpiece. It was written in the same riveting, acrobatic style as Homeboy, and I wept, knowing it would never be completed. This would be the book that would have marked him as the real deal, not just a one-hit wonder.

I drove back to the Abstract, where I turned over Seth’s computer and the disks to the judge. He said he would see that they got to Seth’s family.

I kept his passport.

Seth Morgan could have been a literary giant, as they all predicted. He had it in him. But his demons would not turn loose of his tortured soul.