Customer Reviews

House of Whacks

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

 

 

Branton Whacks it Home Reviewer: Shawn M. Vidmar from Pueblo, Colorado Matthew Branton's ingenious novel, *House of Whacks*, brings the pulp detective novel into the 90's. His characters are intriguing and interesting. He introduces them so completely, and yet subtly that the reader finds herself not only caring about their story, but able to tell them apart without the tale-tell dialog tag lines. Each one is developed so carefully throughout the book that I never had to go back and remind myself who was who and why they were there.

In this post McCarthy hearing time frame, he develops heroes and heroines that are brassy, bold and resolute. They have separate and definable motives of survival.

Through vigilant structure and brilliant story telling, Branton is able to craft a book similar in detail and stylishness to the Academy Award Winning *LA Confidential*. The flash bulbs pop and crackle. The pornographic camera whirs and chunks. Wayward women find themselves in the thick of an underground studio, which is in turn involved in some other seedy business threatening everyone's life. And yet, through the dark humor and active bumblings of some characters, all threads of the story culminate in a dazzling resolution that will whack your socks off.

He brings the film noir detective fiction to light, a lost art in my opinion. A great read for any fan of noir.

I don't buy the maxim, "never judge a book by its cover". The House of Whacks by Matthew Branton has a great one, and Bettie Page's presence on it is the reason I picked the book up in the first place.

Branton's also chosen a great setting for his multiple plot thread caper novel: Chicago in 1950.

One story involves Susan, a Bettie Page composite posing for soft core bondage shots at a "studio" called the House of Whacks. The place is owned by Giotto, one of the city's two mob bosses, and the one who's trying to go legit. Susan quickly falls in love with Ben Kahane, Giotto's right-hand man. Meanwhile, Misty, soon to be ex-editor of a dying horror pulp magazine, herself dying of cancer, cooks up a plot to rob Giotto's mob of a shipment of Nazi gold being trucked in from who-knows-where for distribution around the country. Misty enlists the aid of the best men she knows: her stable of hack writers who've cooked up thousands of heist plots for the pulps over the years. The third storyline involves Lucky, hack screenwriter who, after his stuntwoman girlfriend Lucy's career-ending accident, loads them both into his car and drives to Chicago to give their mob-connected producer a piece of his mind.

Aside from some anachronistic expressions (I doubt "tech-head" was in use in 1950) and some poorly researched geography this is a blast of a book. It's closer in spirit to one of Donald E. Westlake's caper novels than it is to a James Ellroy book (to which it's been compared). The dialogue rings true and the sleazy setting of the House of Whacks is convincingly portrayed.

This is a book whose premise I liked better than the actual execution. The idea of 1950s Chicago, an actress turned S&M model (think Betty Page), mobsters, a dying tough-girl editor, hack pulp writers, a struggling screenwriter, and a heist of Nazi gold, sounds great, but fails to hold together in the end. Branton expends so much effort on recreating the hard-boiled setting and slang that the plot zigs and zags all over the place with annoying time shifts and a disappointing denouement. It might have been more compelling had Branton stuck with one or two main characters and went a little deeper into their lives, and paid a little more attention to plot (for example, the various heist plans are bafflingly stupid). While comparisons with LA Confidential aren't totally off base, Leonard's book is big league material, and this is strictly wanna-be. The 1950s dialogue is occasionally marred by 1990s expressions, and more irritatingly, by Anglicisms that the editor should have easily caught.

i really liked this book. i liked the characters and the story, but while reading it i figured it was too good to be true and prepared myself for a bad ending. very, very surprisingly it was a good ending, it made sense and it fit with the rest of the book. it made me feel all smokey and sultry and hollywood nocturne-y.

This book started off promising but quickly became an exercise in warmed-over characters, plotting, and dialogue. As another reviewer points out, the 50s setting is not carried through the dialogue, which indeed sounded far too 90s. Several of the character's ruminations about 50's B-movies and horror sounded so close to other sources (most notably Stephen King's own thoughts on the topic in his nonfictional Danse Macabre) that I almost expected to see an acknowledgment page at the end. My biggest complaint, however, is the way in which chapters ended with a 'surprise.' Often, what would have been a more interesting scene in terms of character responses is left for some new scene, stifling the material. This stop and start pacing and a heist that takes too long to develop make this book an overall disappointment. The reader's time is far better spent with any of the LA Noir series by James Ellroy.

These reviews! Branton's view of 50's society enthralled me from beginning to end. I won't bother elaborating on the characters and plot here, as you can read that in the editorial. I will say that I found both interesting and imaginative, more so because you can trace their origins in contempory popular culture, as criticised above. Get this, this is somewhat the point of Branton's writing, as you would know if you had read the excellent 'Love Parade' and 'Coast'. It's a guessing game to spot your own coolness. If only we could all be this slick...

Were we reading the same book? I loved it. One of the best books of the 90s. Atmosphere, suspense, far-out characters, cool locations, cool dialogue ... you feel like the author watched all the same shows as you,read the same books, got off on the same movies ...then put it all into something new, something that's just the best. The line from pulp fiction is brilliantly used, setting a scene fast and economically before he takes it off to a totally new place. This is what Tarantino does so well himself. As for King of New York ... I can only say, were we reading the same book? Did the guy above read more than the first dozen pages? Should have read more, and been as blown away as I was. I loved it. Awesome. Can't wait for the next one.

I admit I bought this book because of the terrific cover featuring Bettie Page. Also, it is set in my home town (Chicago), and a quick scan promised something along the lines of James Ellroy's *The Big Nowhere.* After I read the first chapter my hopes were high - but then the book disintegrated into about six different stories that I thought were inelegantly linked. It seemed like Branton had several projects that he thought were good and stirred them together to make a novel. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out which story I was reading.

I almost finished this book. I would have, except that, as much as I had initially been drawn in by what seemed like strong story and character development, I just lost interest. After a while, (and the first two <b><i>Pulp Fiction</i></b> quotes i.e.,"We're associates of you're business partner. You do remember your business partner?"), I began to realize that these characters weren't original(one of the main characters seems loosely based on Christoper Walken's character in <i><b>The King of New York</i></b>, the prose did <b>not</b> match the period (he's got people in the 50's talking as if it's the 90's. i.e., "Like, um, what are you going to do?"). And a pet peeve of mine, British writers who want to write American novels but then slip in stupid British sayings like, "It'll work a treat!"
Whatever. I really tried to be fair, but this book bites and it was disappointing even though I didn't have high expectations.