Customer Reviews

Robbers

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"Robbers" is an astonishing debut novel. Cook is as easy with his craft and characters as if he had been at this for years. The East Texas honky-tonk, just-getting-by-but-not-quite, the On the Road ambiance is the warp and weave of this book.

Ex-cons Eddie and Ray Bob, "runnin' buddies," stop at a convenience store for cigarettes. Eddie is a penny short of the price, and the stuffy clerk is adamant, and Eddie shoots him. It is hard to tell who is more amazed, Eddie or the victim. Eddie carefully lays down four one dollar bills and goes back to the car whereupon Ray Bob rushes back, cleans out the till (and retrieves Eddie's four dollars) grabs snacks, cartons of cigarettes and sandwiches. When he ambles back to the ragtop Caddie (stolen?), he announces, "You can't steal from a dead man." Their odyssey has begun, a rampage of raiding convenience stores and leaving dead clerks. They are shot with luck, as there never are any witnesses and things go well until they pick up Della, who has had a spot of trouble of her own.

Ray Bob is vicious, highly intelligent psychopath who is jealous of Della coming between him and his runnin' buddy. Eddie, a sweet dim bulb with the soul of an artist, is clearly over his head with the murderous Ray Bob and infatuated with Della. Della, an almost "babe" (her eyes are too close together) is a combination of low down schemer and "what's a nice girl like me doing with thugs like you."

You get to know these three like members of your family (though you wouldn't want to admit you knew them.) There is a Texas Ranger grimly trying to trail him, and victim's husband who is a religious zealot and a gun nut who is following the ranger, but Ray Bob, Eddie and Della are blissfully unaware. Texas wraps around you like a sandy scarf. You think this is going to end up like the gunfight at OK Corral, but Mr. Cook has many surprises in store before you reach that last page. When you close the book, you will think long and hard about justice, in the abstract and in the particular.

"Robbers" is wonderfully written, and I would choose it as my second favorite book of 2003 (after "Life of Pi"). There have been many comparisons made from Faulkner to James Lee Burke, but I'd have to say Mr. Cook has his own unique voice, and a very good one it is.
-sweetmolly-Amazon Reviewer

Timing is everything. For Christopher Cook's manuscript of his first novel "Robbers," everything couldn't have been worse.

The day the book was sent out for bids from publishers was the day, two years ago April 20, of the Columbine school massacre.

Nobody, that day, was looking for a modern Western shoot-'em-up. Not one publisher made a bid.

"Robbers" eventually found its place between hard covers (Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc., New York) and is on its way to finding widespread readership, chalking up excellent reviews, including The New York Times.

Here's my personal endorsement: I read it three times in the past month and have recommended it to most everybody I think would enjoy it.

That's not necessarily everybody.

"Robbers" puts you on the road with a couple of Texas psycho, good- ol'- boy bad guys on a murder spree of convenience store clerks, beginning with a fellow who was a penny foolish.

When one of the pair, Eddie, comes up one cent short for a pack of cigarettes at an Austin 7-Eleven, the clerk --"a plump young man with burnished bronze skin and a black mustache, either Indian or Pakistani" -- refuses to cut the price even a penny.

"'What kind of !#$% country you come from?'" Eddie says, flipping the top of his Zippo open and shut in one hand.

"'Very fine country,'" the clerk says. "'Where we pay for what we get.'"

"'Listen to me. This is America. Gimmee them cigarettes.'"

"Only the guy didn't budge. Not one word, just standing there like a chocolate Deputy Doright. A corner of his mouth lifting slightly, either a smirk or twitch."

That's when Eddie "hoisted a leg and reached into his boot. Pulled a .22 revolver, an old Colt Police Positive with a four-inch barrel, looked like a toy. Pointed it at the guy. Arm straight out, finger on the trigger. Saying, 'Gimmee them !#$% cigarettes.'"

"'Robbery,' the man squawked. He stared at the gun, dark eyes blinking, teethed his upper lip, jaw thrust forward. 'I call the police. Get your license plate.'

"So Eddie pulled the trigger. A sharp crack, the barrel kicking up. The bullet caught the clerk square in the forehead. His head snapped back, a small black hole in the bronze curvature. He stood there with his hands on the counter a moment, eyes crossed, then slid down onto the floor out of sight."

Too real for you? Then don't read "Robbers." It is real Texas -- really violent, really sexy and really religious.

If the mix of religion with sex and violence seems out of place, then you don't know the place Texas is, especially the rural regions.

The author, Christopher Cook, 48, knows it well. He grew up in what's called the Golden Triangle of Southeast Texas, where the petrochemical industry pulls country boys up by their roots from the Pineywoods and into the refineries along the Gulf Coast.

That's where the killers wind up, with a Texas Ranger closing in on them. One makes it all the way to his home county of Jasper, where the dragging death of a black man is a fresh memory.

I'll tell you this much about the conclusion of its finely crafted plot: Good guys don't always win, bad guys don't always lose. But don't worry: nothing awful happens to the little puppy.

Cook has the Texas vernacular nailed, which he expertly utilizes in description as well as dialogue, one blending into the other without quote marks to separate the line of thought.

I would have liked the style better with normal punctuation for quotes, which I took liberty in adding to the section excerpted above.

Cook, whom I met in Austin recently, explained that what his characters think and what they say can't be easily distinguished. It's a literary thing. Maybe you understand.

What I know is simply this: "Robbers" is well written, well-plotted and superb in its characterization of a deep dark subculture, deep in the heart of Texas.

P.S. The British edition of "Robbers" was just released; French, German and Japanese editions are coming out later this year. Cook has a short story collection, "Screen Door Jesus & Other Tales," that will be published this fall, and a filmmaker in New York is making a movie based on those stories. In May, Cook moved to Prague where he is working on his next novel.

I am not a practiced book reviewer, just a avid reader. It has been a long time since I have read a "new" story. I was about to take a pickup load of books, with the bookmark about halfway to the middle, to the dumster. It seems that the big name writers have quit writing and started just typeing. Mr. Cook managed to keep me awake nearly all night with his new book. I hope it catches on. Its time we had a good storyteller to make a breakthru to the best seller list. This is the guy.

(The following review by Reed Holland appears in the December issue of Texas Co-op Power magazine) --- Robbers falls within the genre of darkly comic, smart-talk thrillers of Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy and James Lee Burke. Cook, whose novel will soon be published in England, France and Japan, writes with evangelical rhythms and a sheer joy for words that can make his prose read like Faulkneršs or Cormac McCarthy's: "Vast stretches of land to a horizon unbroken save for lonely trailer homes perched queerly in the stepped green-brown expanse, as if dropped from the sky as an alien afterthought." Cook, who lives in Austin, aspires to the literary noire. He finds it in wasteland along the Houston Ship Channel that once was a leper colony, a highway on the Bolivar Peninsula broken away by the Gulf of Mexico, and a hardwood overstory so thick in Jasper County that a deluge of rain roars on the canopy, slowly dripping through, as the action takes a hair-raising turn. Make what you will of Cook's antiheroes, violence and frank carnality, but here's a Texas writer whose eye is keen, and whose voice is sure and strong.

(The following pre-release review was published in the fiction section of PUBLISHERS WEEKLY on October 9, 2000) --- The harsh, foreboding essence of rural Texas dominates Cook's bloody, bittersweet debut novel, charting the adventures of two criminal drifters and their pursuer ... The boys' aimless adventure eventually includes Della, a woman who patterns her life on women's magazines and desperately aspires to middle-class respectability ... as crafty Texas Ranger, Rule Hooks, picks up their scent. Hooks, a tracker by training and instinct, relies on modern police methods as well as his gut instincts to sniff out his prey. Cook's plot tumbles from scene to scene with jarring brilliance, the pathos of his characters lending his otherwise brutal world a certain beauty. His imagery is striking, almost lyrical ... This gritty crime drama is not for the faint of heart, but Cookšs prose sets it a notch above many like novels. The publisher compares the book to the work of James Lee Burke; if booksellers push this comparison, or if they aim the title at a hip, youthful readership, it could make out like a bandit.

So the author probably reads them too. And this novel aims at the same audience. There are small sections that take to Cormac McCarthy's blackmagic realism, huddledup Faulknerian prose like clumps of forrest twixt long stretches of Elmore Leonard-lean dialog, archetypes and anti-archetypes. A character talks about having watermelon sex, as if he read McCarthy himself.

The book is rougher than a typical James Lee Burke, and milder than a typical Cormac McCarthy. It comes closer to a typical Elmore Leonard, but it can't so easily be nailed down. It starts with a cliche, grows with some nice stylistic touches, and I personally loved the ending, although many will not. The ending is...well, unexpected. Anti-cliched.

I'm surprised that the author has not yet come out with another such novel. I'll probably be among those cheering when he does.

Christopher Cook captures the essence of "Natural Born Killers" on the road again. Complex writing that sails through your consciousness makes this a must read for those hot, Texas nights. There are layers of subtle nuance for the well-read reader as well as good solid writing for the not so well-read person. I highly recommend this book.

"Robbers" is an usual first black-comic novel with pretensions toward - well, I don't know what exactly, yet, inexplicably, seems to accomplish all it sets out to do. This book is both disturbing and funny; it is the tale of Eddy and Ray Bob, two bandits who traverse Texas robbing and killing, exchanging ignorant views upon the world, and generally behaving in reprehensible, if strangely entertaining, ways. They are joined about a quarter of the way through by Della, an equally ignorant though far less cold blooded (though certainly callous in her own way) hairdresser who hooks up with Eddy. Meanwhile, the robbers are being tracked by Rule, a slightly less ignorant though far less cold-blooded (though certainly callus in his own way) Texas Ranger, who wants to bring the robbers to justice.

All of these characters confront their own dark pasts and hidden secrets, and they do so in ways that are often hilarious and creepy. There sheer callousness to death that the characters demonstrate is in some ways addictive, and it becomes surprisingly easy to sympathize with these psychos, at least Eddy, who seems less malevolent than his buddy, even though he has committed the crime that begins their running from the law.

At times these overwhelming ignorance of these characters becomes a bit too much; it ceases to be funny and seems a little more like a tired gag. I was reminded of the absurdly clueless southerners of Harry Crews's writing, but Crews plants his characters in a kind of rural circus far removed from reality, whereas Cook seems to want to keep elements of gritty realism.

The other element worth pointing out is Cook's surprising style. He writes the novel in fragmentary sentences and forgoes the cumbersome burden of quotation marks, a la Cormac McCarthy, but not with the same discipline as McCarthy: Reviewer thinking. Not as effective as McCarthy. Remembering. Put to better effect. Saying, Still interesting anyhow.

If you think you can't put up with an entire novel in that format, you may be surprised. I have a low threshold for literary pretensions that aren't rooted in some genuine intellectual project, but I found myself increasingly less irritated by Cook's style, and more and more captivated by his surprisingly effective use of this clunky device. I found the novel compulsively readable, not because I needed to know what happened next - frankly, I almost never cared what happened next - but because each scene was drawn with engaging clarity and interest. In other words, this is a book whose whole is far greater than its constituent parts, and ultimately, it is a fine whole indeed.

I loved this book and so did my 73 year old mother. Swift moving, suspenseful and full of surprises, this book contained no dead air. The replication of the dialect that is peculiar to the area is dead-on and extremely funny. Although the main characters were not necessarily the most likable guys, they are absolutely real. A minor provocation sets the "robbers" of the title on a brutal and self-perpetuating crime spree. As they cut a swath through an evocatively described southeast Texas, they gather a comet's tail of very well drawn hangers on and pursuers. Although you might take issue with the ending, you certainly won't figure it out beforehand. I really recommend this book to readers looking for something different. Christopher Cook is a truly unique voice in the overpopulated and many times undistinguished genre of crime fiction.

What we got here are a couple of Texas lowlifes--Ray Bob and Eddie--only one of them is lower than the other, and the lower one, Ray Bob, is one mean SOB. Ray Bob would as soon shoot you as look at you, you don't say the right thing. Eddie is a more forgiving kinda guy.

But as runnin' buddies they're together and so Eddie gets caught up in Ray Bob's karma. Not good. Meanwhile we got Della Street who's on the lam for defending herself against a scumbag, and the law, in the form of Rule Hooks, who's out to nab whoever killed his friend, another lawman.

This Cook guy is one helluva writer. I was you, I'd pick this up and read it. You'll have a great time; these are characters who talk to you same time they're talking to each other, you catch my drift. This has heart, soul, and some nasty stuff in it which being a crime novel's bound to happen.

I loved this. Think you will too.