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May 2008 - BOOK REVIEW by Ryn Gargulinski
"Cruel Poetry"
by Vicki Hendricks
Serpent's Tail
$14.95
ISBN 978-1852429270

Alligators eat severed body parts. The sex—and roaches— are heavy and constant. The air is brutal; the blood is bad. The heroine is a prostitute.

We love it all, and not just for the sex. I liked it most for the alligators.

Vicki Hendricks’ noir novel Cruel Poetry (Serpent’s Tail, 2007) manages to combine the seedy, shady and criminally insane into a tasty read. We savor every last morsel, roach bits and all.

Yes, sex is always a big seller, but I usually can’t get into reading about it. It reminds me too much of finding that underground fort in my suburban hometown where we happened upon a thick stash of Playboy magazines. Something about the experience just made my skin crawl. Hendricks deals a lot with the forbidden.

The author opens the novel with a steamy scene from a sordid motel bedroom with our prostitute friend, engaged in one of her many exploits.

Vicki Hendricks’ noir novel manages to combine the seedy, shady and criminally insane into a tasty read. We savor every last morsel, roach bits and all.

Prostitute Renata awakens in the grungy room that is her home next to her lover and business partner Francisco.

Hendricks writes: “His lips are toned muscles like the rest of him. The bite of cigarettes and last night’s beer turn her on like a switch, familiar accompaniments to the hard cock.”

I was tempted to slam the cover. But I recalled one of the reasons I don’t like reading about sex is because of childhood notions drummed into my head that it’s ugly, bad and sinful. Hendricks deals a lot with the ugly, bad and sinful.

Part of its allure is the short chapters written from three main viewpoints. We have the whore we come to adore, her meek, wannabe novelist neighbor and the professor, just call him Dick.

Each character adds a dimension to the whole. Renata is the tough, hardened street gal; neighbor Jules is the dreamy innocent; Richard, or Dick, is the respected professor who is a poet at heart.  

The novel serves as a coming of age for each of them. Renata, who promises not to love as it has only led to hurt—“Everyone I love dies,” she tells us—let’s her heart soften, if just a bit. She doesn’t become a Hallmark card, but lets emotions through just enough to show she, too, is human and not just a sex machine. Sometimes.

Jules blossoms from the unworldly girl next door to a cold blooded killer. Almost. She still tends to vomit when it comes to blood and severed body parts.

We don’t want the book to end. The action, combined with all the alluring elements of noir, keep us wrapped as if in a black widow’s web.

Professor Dick? He learns what freedom is all about. Sure, it may mean losing everything he knows, including his sanity, but boy, oh, boy, is he free.

I shan’t wreck the ending except to say that Richard finds the truest freedom of all at the novel’s conclusion.

We don’t want the book to end. The action, combined with all the alluring elements of noir, keep us wrapped as if in a black widow’s web.

When I usually hear the term “noir” I immediately think of that really awful David Lynch movie where the haggish lady won’t stop singing about a plush navy fabric.

Digging deeper into the genre, not unlike digging into a grave, I find I’ve been exposed to more noir than I realized. I also found it has many of the same elements that make me such a sucker for true crime.

These include a callous attitude towards crime. Cruel Poetry lures us so deep into the squalid South Florida motel scene that by the time the premiere murder goes down, the first thing we do is clap our hands, rather than wash the blood off them.

The more we’re sucked into the novel’s slimy depths, the more we are willing to suspend our thoughts of what’s plausible and simply enjoy the slippery ride.

Sex, drugs and bastions of booze are another noir must. Beer for breakfast; vodka for lunch. Sex on the beach for dinner. The drug Ecstasy is a midnight snack. We watch Jules and Richard descend into the alcoholic pit and somehow, thanks to Hendricks’ cool manipulation, we find it less disgusting than romantic.

One major difference in true crime literature is, unless you’re as sick in the head as the main character, you don’t like him or her very much.

Not Renata, our femme fatale. We love her. We want her. We need her. We even think it’s kind of cute when she blows two guys to smithereens. With a gun, that is.

Classical noir fiction guru Raymond Chandler insisted of the genre: “It must consist of the plausible actions of plausible people in plausible circumstances.”

When looked at logically, Cruel Poetry is not plausible at all. But logic, as well as shunning what’s illegal or taboo, goes right out the window. The more we’re sucked into the novel’s slimy depths, the more we are willing to suspend our thoughts of what’s plausible and simply enjoy the slippery ride.

 
   


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