High Life (Little House on the Bowery) [Paperback]

Matthew Stokoe (Author)

Book Description

Series: Little House on the Bowery | Publication Date: January 1, 2002

Fiction. Jack had gone to Hollywood with one ambition: to become famous, a star, exactly how he didn't care. He just wanted to be like the people whose lives he followed in gossip magazines...Instead he found a world more seedy than anything he could have imagined, a world of whores and deceit, snuff shows, incest, drugs-and despair. After his wife, Karen, a hooker, is murdered and disemboweled, he meets Bella, a beautiful woman of immense wealth. In her he sees a change to make his dreams come true. As it turn out, though, his nightmare is only beginning. "...An elaborately drawn, surgically accurate Hollywood dystopia..."-Ellen Miller. "Stokoe proves himself a worthy heir to the great tradition of California noir"-Henry Flesh.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Set against the sweltering, noirish backdrop of Los Angeles where "money is part of the architecture of the city," this bleak, violent novel upholds English author Stokoe's reputation for gritty, sordid fiction (Cows). Jack, a drugged-out tabloid fanatic and wannabe Hollywood star, grows worried when his wife, Karen, a street prostitute, goes missing for several days. He discovers that she has been murdered ("gutted like a fish") and that he is under investigation by Ryan, a sleazy minor vice cop, who takes on the homicide case himself since he was previously one of Karen's customers. Jack makes a promise to himself to find Karen's killer while supporting himself by becoming a hustler. Stokoe's plot thickens by way of urban legend. Before her disappearance, Karen confessed to Jack that she had sold one of her kidneys for $30,000 to a mysterious doctor trawling Hollywood Boulevard. After a succession of vile sex dates, Jack winds up face-to-face with Bella and Powell Vernier, an incestuous father and daughter surgical team who might be implicated in Karen's murder. Accusations and dead bodies (not to mention necrophilia) emerge just as Jack's acting career begins to take off. Stokoe's in-your-face prose and raw, unnerving scenes give way to a skillfully plotted (though largely implausible) tale that will keep readers glued to the page, if they can stomach the gratuitous obscenities and the excessively graphic descriptions of sex and violence (and violent sex). Stokoe's protagonist is as gritty and brutal as they come, which will frighten away the chaste crowd, but the author's target Bret Easton Ellis audience could turn this one into a word-of-mouth success.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

How does a contemporary author update classic noir writers like James M. Cain and Jim Thompson? For Stokoe (Cows), the solution is to ratchet up the sex by several notches. Jack, an English transplant to Los Angeles, is totally immersed not only in bodily fluids but also in the mythos of Hollywood. He gains sustenance from obsessing about the lives of every Tom, Brad, and Leonardo in Hollywood - which comes at the expense of what passes for his real life. For about a year, he's been married to a practicing prostitute who has recently sold one of her kidneys. When she goes missing, he goes out to find her (or her body), an attempt that plops him amid a cast of kinky characters, including porn-star Rex and police officer Ryan, who leaves a trail of slime in his wake. Above all, though, are Bella and Powell, who give new meaning to the concept of keeping their marriage fresh. While Stokoe has the noir cadences and atmosphere down pat, and Ryan is a character of quintessential sleaziness, the relentless rough sex ultimately becomes as boring and mechanical as thumbing through Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis. Purchase where demand warrants. - Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 326 pages
• Publisher: Akashic Books (January 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1888451327
• ISBN-13: 978-1888451320
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #927,750 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Starts slow, picks up., November 15, 2005

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: High Life (Little House on the Bowery) (Paperback)

Matthew Stokoe, High Life (Akashic, 2002)

Matthew Stokoe's first novel, Cows, is the kind of sucker punch that actually grabs hold, tears the skin of your belly wide, and hollows out your abdominal cavity, all for the sake of being bored and wanting a snack. How do you follow up something like Cows? You're basically inviting yourself over the cliff of the sophomore curse.

High Life does, in fact, suffer from said sophomore curse, albeit briefly (and in the ugliest of manners). For a few pages, Stokoe seems to have lost all the sense of pacing that made Cows a novel that commanded you to read it in one sitting. Unfortunately, for "a few" here, you can read "the first half of the novel." It starts out slow-- glacially slow. Even though in the opening pages you're treated to a disembowelled corpse, a necrophiliac cop, and more drugs than you can shake a stick at, you're likely to have a relatively rough time getting through the first hundred or so pages.

Once the novel picks up, though, the old Stokoe comes back, and with a vengeance. There are fetishes in this book I'm relatively sure don't even have names yet. Stokoe's rather distressing knowledge of the Hollywood drug trade gets mapped over into a discussion of the trade in anonymous black-market organs, we revisit some of the scarier scenes in Cows from a Hollywood perspective, and, if it's possible, things get even more disgusting than they did in Cows. The first half of the novel crawls; the second flies. Like Stokoe's first book, the second half of this one will keep you up late wondering how this maniac thinks this stuff up.

High Life is, at its heart, a murder mystery. Its protagonist, Jack, is a thoroughly shallow narcissist whose sole ambition in life is to become an actor, for he believes that actors are archetypes of humanity, perfect beings who will, in a way, never die. As the book opens, Karen, his prostitute wife, is found dead and mutilated in a park not far from their place. Jack is immediately suspected of the murder by Ryan, an aging, nitro-popping cop who's got, shall we say, some very serious issues. Jack decides that with this incompetent moron on the case, he'd probably be better off solving the murder himself, and, in his own drugs-and booze-fueled way, he sets about doing so, taking a quick detour into prostitution himself in the process.

It's somewhat easier to recommend High Life than it was Cows (about which I said "This book is not for everyone. In fact, it may not be for anyone." despite it making my Top Reads of 2004 list), if only because the unsuspecting, innocent reader is likely to be intrigued by the murder long before Stokoe hits you with both gore-drenched, perverse barrels. If you're willing to put up with a somewhat glacial pace at the beginning and are a fan of, shall we say, the more extreme murder mystery, High Life may well be right up your alley. (As with Cows, though, it helps-- a lot-- to have a very strong stomach.) Those of you already inured to the antics of more extreme artists, however, would be better advised to go looking for Stokoe's harder-to-find, but punchier, first effort. *** ½

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WEEEE, December 4, 2002

By 

Josh Lewis (Dallas, Texas United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: High Life (Little House on the Bowery) (Paperback)

matthew stokoe is an amazing writer.
in cows, his first novel, it got all crazy from the very start.

in high life stokoe shows considerable restraint by slowly getting to the good stuff. by doing this he has made the intense scenes even more powerful because they aren't the focus. they just happen to be in the story.

once again, stokoe is an amazing writer. i look forward to reading more from him.

p.s. anyone comparing stokoe to bret easton ellis, or ian banks, or poppy z brite are [fools]. he blows them away completely and then goes back and rapes their skulls.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A pleasant and shocking surprise, May 8, 2009

By 

Megan N. Woodrum "quiet bookworm" (Ohio, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: High Life (Little House on the Bowery) (Paperback)

I admit, I wasn't expecting much. A lot of shock-value novels are poorly written and juvenile, with very little literary merit to their credit. So when I read this novel, I was shocked at what an excellent piece of fiction it is. Expertly crafted and written with a strong voice, the story carries along at a brisk pace without being rushed. There are strong, interesting characters reminiscent of a Palahniuk novel, but grittier and with less humor. I stayed up until 5 am to finish it, and will definitely be rereading it.