The future James Boice imagines in The Good and The Ghastly is a sterile, uniform world in the full force grip of corporate whitewashing. It's 1,400 years in the future, and a nuclear war in the distant past (our present) hit the reset button on civilization. The world has returned to a modern existence, but now Visa owns everything, companies have generic names (Expensive Car Company, Expensive Hotel, and so on) and the past is seen only through a muddy, chaotic lens colored by the devastation that came before.
Into this semi-dystopian landscape Boice paints two figures whose primitive ambitions color their world like bloodstains. Junior Alvarez is a young criminal fresh out of juvenile detention. Inspired by his readings on Alexander the Great (Alejandro el Grande, he calls him), Junior makes a vow to conquer his own world, and to do it by any means necessary. In his first street-fight since his return to his Northern Virginia neighborhood, Junior critically injures another young man, leaving him brain damaged. The boy's mother, Josefina, is a dutiful landlady and parent until she learns the fate of her son. Then, without even knowing the name of his attacker, she becomes something else: a huntress.
The Good and the Ghastly is a dual portrait of Junior and Josefina as their lives rise and fall and swirl around each other. Both have an ultimate goal in mind, both have a kind of bloodlust coloring their every move, and both are somehow doomed by their respective quests. It's not an unfamiliar concept, but in Boice's hands it becomes new and gripping.
Boice's prose carries the kind of energy that you always want in good crime fiction. It's fast without being hasty, smart without being pretentious and brutal without being overwrought. His scenes and characters have power in themselves, but it's the prose that gives them weight, from Junior's post-empire paranoia to Josefina's desperate, violent hunt for the man who wrecked her family.
There's nothing more this book really needs, but Boice's rebuilt future is so fun to walk around in that you almost wish for more of it. His characters discuss the works of Bob Dylan (including ones he didn't actually write, like "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"), visit a giant statue of Garfield in the Midwest (historians postulate that it was used for religious purposes) and even see a kind of post-apocalyptic Pompeii, a whole town frozen in time by a nuclear blast filled with, well...us. It's a shame there's not more darkly comic moments of futuristic imagining, but in a way any more would cheapen what Boice is really writing about.
The Good and the Ghastly is not a book about the future, nor is it really a book about crime. It's a book about the brutality of the human spirit, the desperate, clawing side that will always lurk in us no matter what era we live in. It's a book about violence and power and revenge and what they do to us, packaged in a compelling crime story artfully told by one of the most magnetic voices in modern fiction.
The Good and the Ghastly is available June 14 from Scribner.
Advance Reading Copy courtesy of Scribner
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