Customer Reviews

Hogdoggin'

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I read the first book Yellow Medicine in two sittings. Following Billy Lafitte, a disgruntled police officer. Who was judged for his bad deeds down South and moved North. Created even more bad deeds.

But when I got Hogdoggin' in the mail I was blown away. Billy is now part of a motorcycle gang led by Steel God. Hiding out from Rome, a rogue FBI agent from Yellow Medicine who wants Billy's blood. I won't spoil this. Just buy the damn book. Try to put it down. It's a well written adrenaline-fueled-noir/hardboiled masterpiece. A page turner. I think we've found our new Jim Thompson with a touch of Hunter S. Thompson.

A whole stack of nasty characters are set to collide. They are obsessed, they are dark, they are capable of extreme violence and their missions all overlap. Rogue cop on the run, Billy Lafitte (last seen in the excellent YELLOW MEDICINE), returns here, roided up, biker-affiliated and ready for the inevitable confrontation with FBI agent Rome, a man hellbent on bringing him down. The animosity between the two may be the spine of the book, but HOGDOGGIN' is very much an ensemble piece and there are plenty more characters waiting for their cue to enter. HOGDOGGIN' is Smith's noir answer to THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY. With bikers, steroids, and...well, that would be telling. Just buy it.

I'm not sure what it says about me that I love Billy Lafitte, ex-cop, 'roid rager, off-the-grid fugitive with anger management issues. But, damn, I do. And I love Smith's harrowing, twisted, treacherous tale of misplaced love and revenge. If you're in the hunt for a wild ride, you've found it. And even if you're not, live a little. Grab hold of this book and hang the hell on.

Anthony Neil Smith returns with a blood thirsty, intensely satisfying follow up to his third novel, Yellow Medicine. For fans of Smith, his fourth novel Hogdoggin' is a welcome return to a group of memorable characters--particularly shamed crooked cop Billy Lafitte and the obsessive Federal Agent Franklin Rome--and settings that we wished Smith could have explored further with the first book, and for first time readers, Hogdoggin' provides a solid introduction to Smith's unique, hard charging prose style.

The action picks up 9 months after the explosive events of Yellow Medicine and we find former cop Billy Lafitte stripped of his police shield and branded as a terrorist and now living underground with an outlaw biker club known as the Steel Army. Lafitte is second-in-command of the club (Under the enigmatic and cancer ridden leader, Steel God.)and is preparing to take over the gang at any minute. (either by force or by Steel God succumbing to his long term, untreated illness.)Lafitte is haunted by the events at the end of Yellow Medicine, particularly the death of friend and sometime lover, Drew, and his inability to have a part in the lives of his two young children.

Lafitte has just taken part in a "trial" and execution of the Steel Army's former Sargent-at-Arms, Red Gator, when he receives a call from a secretly stashed cell phone letting him know that he has to return to Yellow Medicine county and that Federal Agent Franklin Rome has been harassing Lafitte's ex-wife in an attempt to draw Lafitte out of hiding.
And as expected, Lafitte leaves the Steel Army and sets out to vainly try to protect his family.

Needless to say, it's all down hill from there.

Much like Yellow Medicine, Smith sets up Hogdoggin' as a slow burn, carefully building tension and atmosphere and then having the narrative explode under his careful hand.There's a lot to like about the novel, Smith's writing is razor sharp and there is rarely a misstep through out it's entire 320 pages. Fans of so-called "neo" noir will be thrilled by the blood and action, and in the same breath fans of such transgressive writer's as Chuck Palahniuk and Will Christopher Baer will be pleased by Smith's overall skills as a writer and chronicler of deviant lifestyles.
Overall, Smith's ability as a writer easily tackles the many threads and sub-plots of this novel and leaves you begging for more.
Highly recommended.

THere's nothing kind here in this, the second, Billy Lafitte novel from Anthony Neil Smith. Yes, our favorite gone-rogue cop is still riding out his crazy transplant to Minnesota and going --literally-- hog wild all over the northern parts of the US.
If you like your crime fiction dark as pitch and your hard-boiled burned through the shell, then Hogdoggin' is a must read for you to get into your hands. Smith spares no details and shows no fear as he gives us nothing but the dirtiest dirties in this awesome book!

Anthony Neil Smith's YELLOW MEDICINE was one of my favorite novels of 2008 and with HOGDOGGIN' he has surpassed all expectations. The return of Billy Lafitte is a welcome one, and that's coming from a guy who really isn't too big on sequels or recurring characters.

Our man Lafitte is now a fugitive and working off the grid with some sordid and nasty types with names like Red Gator and Steel God. Federal Agent Rome is back, too, and he has a burning obsession to take down Lafitte that knows no bounds. And he has a plan to bring Billy back on the radar...

All of which is just scratching the surface of what Smith has going on with HOGDOGGIN' because with the new novel Smith has put down the literary machete of his earlier novels and is now wielding a straight razor. He jabs, slices, and opens a series of big, wet wounds without flinching. He's got the noir sensibilities down, and this is a top shelf novel of crime and will more than satisfy any reader of the genre, but it's also a solid piece of literary work, direct kin of writers like Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews, Larry Brown, and Daniel Woodrell.

Which isn't to say he's aping any of those folks. Rather, he has a voice that, even as it brings the work of those fine writers to mind, hits square and hard simultaneously upside the head, straight to the gut and, ultimately, the heart.

Enough from me. Buy HOGDOGGIN', read it, and spread the good word on this outstanding novel.

Not for the faint of heart, this is a dark, violent, bloody, kinky, funny, and kinetically paced crime novel. What sticks, however, is Smith's ability to illuminate the humanity in his not-so-lovable losers. Lafitte's FBI nemesis Rome is back and bent on revenge, but the central conflict between the pair is primarily the thread used to tie together a large cast of vividly rendered secondary characters. The switch from the first person narrative of "Yellow Medicine" to the third person of "Hogdoggin'" broadens the scope of Smith's pitch black noir and helps bring out the human foibles of his desperate characters.

I have read Hogdoggin' over twenty-four hours and I was in no hurry. When I like what I'm reading, I can take a week to read it. Ten days if the novel is particularly long. But when I LOVE what I read, it's hard to pry me off the pages. Hogdoggin' is the best novel I've read this year so far. Better than My Dark Places and American Tabloid. Even better than The Executioner's Song. Both are a different kind of good, Mailer's novel is more exhaustive and detailed, but it suffers from pacing issues that Hogdoggin' doesn't even consider bothering with. It's a study on the chaotic nature of violence and yet, it's a non-stop pedal-to-the-metal tale of good intention gone bad, really bad. It's not completely necessary to read Yellow Medicine to appreciate the savage beauty of Hogdoggin', but I recommend it. Then you can appreciate the great truth of canonical noir novels. It can only get worse.

One of the most meaningful changes that Anthony Neil Smith made for Hogdoggin' is that he switched to third person storytelling. It could've been incidental, but it's a major component of the novel's success. It's darker, has a broader scope and gives a better portrait of the nature of crime. The novel starts a few months after the event of Yellow Medicine. Billy Lafitte has disappeared and joined a biker's gang, where he became the enforcer of a demented, seven foot tall biker chief named Steel God. He grew his hair long, grew a beard and took fifty pounds of muscle, thanks to his newfound use of anabolic steroids. Billy Lafitte, the policeman is long dead. Despite his best efforts to build a new life for himself, Lafitte is cornered by his past and forced to go back to painful memories before he can go on. And the past has a name. Franklin Rome. The ex-homeland security, now FBI agent is growing obsessed with Lafitte and will use every dirty trick he knows to smoke him out of his hole. At any cost.

There are two school of thoughts regarding crime in general. There are those who find crime irresistibly cool and perceive high profile criminals as liberated minds and self-righteous heroes. Then, there are those who regard crime as pathological and "evil". They are two kind of people, sharing a similar output on criminality. To them, life is a team sport and the laws are the rule book. Hogdoggin' walks a fine line in-between those two polarized perception of this man-made concept and does is spectacularly. Violence breeds violence, that most people will agree, but any kind of violence will bring a subject (here, Lafitte) to make pressed, dangerous choices, that will bring other criminals in the equation. Scavengers and opportunists. Then, these new variables will make the initiator of all that madness (Rome) take different decisions and rush to finish the task. It's a wheel that keeps going faster and faster. When you surround yourself with bad people, bad things happen and you should be ready to live that lifestyle all the way. While Hogdoggin' is over-the-top and sometimes very funny, there's a Damocles sword hanging over the character's head and makes their actions tainted with a stunning despair.

The supporting cast of Hogdoggin' gives it a supplementary coat of varnish that makes it shine even brighter. Desiree, Franklin Rome's estranged wife starts as a weird antagonist to the antagonist, but evolves throughout the novel to become one of the most interesting characters. I cannot speak for the writer here, but she seems to be the kind of character that took a life of her own while being written. She's discovers a good deal of her inner strength, in a twisted, parallel subplot that makes way too much sense. Steel God is quite the unique creation and and starts the novel with one of the most memorable first chapters I've read in a while. And then there's McKeown, Colleen, Fawn, Perry and even Ginny Lafitte, who plays a bigger role than in the previous novel. It's still barely a cameo, but she almost steals the show from Desiree. When you hurt a lot of people to conform to the lifestyle you chose, it's the life of everybody that knew them you toss upside down. Hogdoggin' does a great job at illustrating that, with brevity and haunting images.

The challenge of writing a crime/mystery/noir novel is to show accurately the narcissistic nature of mankind. It's the self-preservation/self-improvement/self everything, that makes someone try to step over somebody else's head. It also spreads like a virus and soon enough, everybody feels alienated, angry and are prone to destruction on a wide scale. Hogdoggin' perfectly embodies that. It's a perfect object, frozen in time. I mean, it's not the proverbial novel that will give you a Stendhal syndrome episode with its insightful and poetic prose, but it's perfect for what it is. Like The Wire was perfect for television or like Mystic River was perfect when it came out. I've never read something that had such a human approach to crime and yet, manage to keep an unbelievable pace. Yellow Medicine was great, but Hogdoggin' has the lasting power of the greatest crime novels. It's not going to attract every reader, but if you can appreciate any sort of crime novel, Hogdoggin' blow your expectations away, like you have been sitting on a TNT charge. And smile, it's coming for Kindle in June for ninety-nine cents.

Taken from my blog [...]

Smith's talent: his ability to treat violence with a musky weight and yet with insight into all its dimensions, to expose us to the humanity beneath bad deeds, to suck us in with a cast of characters that most authors only handle with indictment, and to force you to keep turning the pages.

Turn the pages, I did. And the more I turned, the more sucked-in I became. It's a book that sticks with you.

In this sequel to the 5 star Yellow Medicine, Smith reunites us with former deputy, Billy Laffitte. Billy has moved on from policing to being the muscle for an outlaw motorcycle gang led by Steel God, quite possibly the baddest biker of all time. Hogdoggin' is a fast paced, vicious romp through another chapter in this great anti-hero's life.