Customer Reviews

Shella

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ghost promises to kill Shella's father. He tells her this. It is so romantic you weep when you read it. Vachss writes crisp. So sharp it cuts your mind. He creates characters with such depth they are bottomless. They are bottomless because the depths of human depravity is bottomless. You like Ghost by the end of the book. Hell, you like him at the beginning. To label him an antihero belittles his character, just as labeling him a murderer belittles his actions. It would be accurate but not accurate. He does kill. A lot. But there is no emotion in it. He is like a weapon. Neither truly good nor truly evil. Simply there. Waiting to have its sights locked and its trigger pulled. But Ghost, John, whatever his name, doesn't need anyone to justify his actions. He doesn't care about those things. All he cares about is Shella. He will go to hells without number to find her if necessary. And it is necessary. I don't know if one could call what he feels for Shella love. I don't know what it is. Love doesn't exist where he and Shella are. It never did and never will. But the closest word that describes it is love. Does love exist in hell? You'd have to ask Ghost. Perhaps that is what Vachss wants to tell a story about. Maybe he wants to show us what true love is like in true hell.

Vachss writing is spare and brutally to the point (no Anne Rice syndrome here). The world he writes about is bleak, devasting and brutal. In Shella he delves into the world of a young boy abandoned at places where he lived with fear and the constant threat of abuse and grew up to be a cold-hearted, brutal killer for hire who is known as Ghost. Only Shella, a street toughened dancer, ever saw beneath the hard shell. They are separated when Ghost is thrown in jail and now that he's out his one goal is to find Shella.

This is an interesting look into the life of a killer. How cold-heartedly it happens out of necessity and survival. The book is bleak (have I said that already?) and disturbing. This was a difficult to put down book but it's not one I'd like to revisit due its complete sense of despair.

Shella was the first novel by Andrew Vachss I read. Later I learned he was a lawyer and a champion of abused children, when I was seeking the source of the intense hold this book held over me. Mr. Vachss writes with the intensity of a sledge hammer through a plate glass window. He dares you to turn away from the horrors of life that somewhere, deep past the place where nightmares fear to tread, you always knew were there. In his characters Ghost and Shella, we see the victims of an evil polite society many times refuses to believe exists violently transformed into a shadow of the evil which created them. If this is all there was, we'd have the makings of any Hollywood action film. But what kept me reading was, at the core of his main characters, there lies a frail vestige of humanity. Ghost's search for his old partner seems only a damaged attempt to re-establish the only semblance of a family he ever had, and he goes about it the only way he knows how.
I strongly recommend Shella to anyone interested in crime fiction, mystery novels, or horror, as it has elements of each, with this admonition: after you've read it, nothing will seem the same again

Having read the entire Burke series by Andrew Vachss, I decided to read his one novel outside the series called Shella. And as with his other works I was more than pleased. In this fast paced, novel we meet the main characters "Ghost", an abused child who spent his life in foster homes, and institutions from which he emerges an emotionally disturbed killer. His only touch of human feelings coming from an equally disturbed abused child, the stripper turned S&M role player Shella. Written like all of Vachss' works in the first person narrative, we learn of the tale of Shella and Ghost through his eyes. It's a story that takes the reader through a world of violence, abuse, S&M, murder, and neo-Nazis camps. As Ghost tracks down Shella, after his release from prison only to find her terminally ill. Vachss's message again is that people like Ghost and Shella do exist, they are the lost souls of an America which neither cares for, nor wants to help the thousands of children left in state institutions, or with demented foster parents. Who then grow up to be the next generation, of dysfuctional dwellers of our cities, and rural towns. It is a tough no holds barred read, and if you like noir reading, and better still noir with a real message, then I recommend this novel highly.

With "Shella," Vachss strips the narrative down even further than in his Burke novels. The first-person delivery rivals Forrest Gump.

The coverflap lays it out. Ghost is (metaphorically) an alligator; his body and skills have grown during captivity, but his soul is crippled in its youth. With "no experience of nurture or education," he becomes a bare-hands killer with no sense that lives might matter beyond their bounty. The hardback edition features a drawing of an alligator. The corners of the page show a diamond, a spade and a club...no heart. After Ghost's last prison term, he needs to find Shella, the "sole witness to his own humanity." If she's gone, Ghost loses his only evidence of hope in human connection.

The plot involves no self-discovery. Other killers help him find Shella and he helps them by infiltrating a white supremacist stronghold and closing in on the leader. The events serve a cautionary theme. When Ghost (more than once) shows a steadiness and strength of hand ideal for a life-giving surgeon, it's too late for that. When Shella and Ghost reunite, it's also too late.

"Shella" is a sad picture of what people become, by society's doing and by their own. Shella and Ghost weren't torn apart from each other. They were each torn apart when they met, and needed each other to become more or less whole. This is Vachss' best example of dead souls still walking around, playing their roles. An alligator has no greater destiny than One More Day...

In a sharp departure from his Burke series novels, Vachss tackles a different arena laced with the same themes, arsenic and lace wrapped into a prose style so minimalist as to almost not exist--the message? Child abuse, child sexual abuse in specific, produces monsters that, ultimately, will either outcome as saviors or, worst-case scenario, future predators lurking in corners and crevices, wreaking havoc on a world unsuspecting and ignorant in perspective and/or willingness to go the extra distance to fight the monster. Andrew Vachss once again displays a major talent for telling the truth as it is, in reality, not some whitewashed prosaic nonsense blathered about on the 6:00 p.m. news by psychobabble masters and tv talk show brain-deficit fools. This is the real article. Coming at the reader with laser-like poignancy and pen, Mr. Vachss tells the tale of a child grown up in the state system who, like the system spawning him, is devoid of emotion and so, as the equation works its wonders, sets upon the world with the same vicious tenacity and mayhem as the system wrought on him. His only center of emotion is faceted with a remembrance of a woman who made him into a slice of humanity, and this book is a rendering of the circuitous path "Ghost" (the protagonist) must take in order to find that woman, "Shella." Told with an all-embracing pinpointed phraseology, and admixture of poetic grace and sadness, this book is one of Vachss' best. The fact that Burke is not included in this book doesn't in any way minimize its impact; in fact, it actually maximizes the punch to the heartstrings. In a way, Vachss has managed through his amazing ability to characterize the human condition in its grittiest and naked to the bone truth, to allow the reader into a world that we only "imagine" exists and parlay it into the "factual" that it in truth really is. If the reader is interested in what creates monsters on Planet Earth, they would do well to check out Mr. Vachss' other novels featuring the now-famous protagonist, savior of lost souls, and avenger of predatory beasts, Burke, including Blue Belle, Strega, Safe House, and the numerous others in this amazing serial telling of what promulgates and perpetrates the true perpetrators of the worst evil, child abuse.

My favorite of Vachss' novels. The character of Ghost is a fascinating, compelling caraciture of abuse and its sustained effects on children. A very disturbing, violent tale, but ultimately thought-provoking. Vachss is pretty heavy-handed as writers go, though I doubt the man even considers himself an author per se. Rather, I've always gotten the sense he thinks of himself as a "preacher" of sorts -- spreading his particular gospel. When you are trying to save souls, a lack of subtlety is excusable and warranted.

The point of this novel (and, in fact, most all of Vachss' work) can be summed up by recalling the words of the killer, Wesley, in another of the author's novels:

"You do things to us. We grow up and do things to you."

All I can say: I started drinking my drinks in two glasses and watched TV whithout sound after I went through this book. Every men loves Ghost eventhough he's a killer.

All of Andrew Vachss's early novels depict a New York City underbelly of infinite danger and infinite twisted evil... they make for terrifying reads. But for me, and other Vachss readers I've spoken with, SHELLA is the absolute peak of relentless horror. Probably only Vachss could create a situation where a child-like killer searches for the only woman who was ever kind to him, and at novel's end when he finds her, her first words to him are: "Please, KILL ME! " And during the search the main character, Ghost, encounters people and situations that would make Burke's usual enemies look like the regulars at the Tuesday Night sewing circle at a Methodist Church. If you read only one novel by Vachss this should be it.

This is haunting tale of hard-core crime fiction. The main character, Ghost, is a psychopath brought up by the foster care system. He is a quiet, thin man who seems slow-witted. But, he possesses a steely calmness and fast reflexes which makes him dangerous. After being separated from his one love, Shella, he is offered information to her whereabouts. In exchange for this information, he must infiltrate a cult of white supremacists and kill their leader. The novel covers the hate crime, rape and child abuse. I found this story intriguing and shocking as it was based on actual true cases.

Doug Setter, Bsc.
Author of One Less Victim: A Prevention Guide and Stomach Flattening