Customer Reviews

The Shotgun Rule: A Novel

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

One of the strongest crime writers to emerge in recent years, Charlie Huston changes pace with this pitch-perfect story of four teenage boys and how they spent their summer vacation. They entertain themselves by smoking and swearing and dreaming about sex, but when they break into the house of the town's biggest meth cookers, their adventure turns into a nightmare. Huston has the characters down pat in "The Shotgun Rule," capturing their attitudes, ideas and speech like few writers could. Most thrillers aim to entertain by being larger-than-life. "The Shotgun Rule," however, is an intimate, realistic and contained story, and one of the summer's most impressive.

Forget the clichés and superlatives: Charlie Huston is simply the single young writer today with the chops to pick up the slack after the iconoclastic Cormac McCarthy moves on. No rules, no convention, no following the pack with Huston. No political correctness between his pages. But if you haven't experienced the versatility of Huston yet through the Hank Thompson trilogy or the bizarre Joe Pitt duo of "vampyre" novels, you're missing a whole new definition of pop noir, fiction as cynical and insightful as it is bloody and brutal, prose that Huston sears on the page with blow torch intensity.

"The Shotgun Rule" is the story of four teenaged stoners in the parched suburbs of Oakland's eastern hills. George Whelan and his genius younger brother Andy, Hector, the blond-mohawked Mexican, and hair trigger-tempered Paul drink, steal, and dope their way through the summer of '83. Compared to these kids, Bevis and Butthead are Eagle Scouts. But the summer goes from ordinary mayhem to a Charles Manson-class nightmare when Andy's bike is stolen by the local Hispanic thug Arroyo brothers, leading to the discovery of a crack lab and a quick education in the Oakland drug hierarchy, complete with retribution out of their tender aged class.

A word of caution: this can be pretty tough reading. Huston is not one to mince words, nor graphic butchery, and never shies away from tearing down polite social convention. None of the characters are particularly likable, yet they are rendered with an unvarnished but credible fatalism on par with the venerable McCarthy. But this is by no means the equivalent of a Sam Peckinpah film gore fest in print, as the cagey Huston spins some clever twists and unlikely heroes in building from a quirky and sometimes nonlinear story line to a truly memorable climax. Like the ruthless "American History X", "Shotgun" rips a slice of culture from America's bowels, and finishes with a blaze that almost shows a wit of social redeeming value.

In a way, Huston's first five novels were just practice for "The Shotgun Rule", a tour de force of American life that will make you uncomfortable, yet still is mordantly irresistible. This is required reading - but don't pick it up unless you have several free hours ahead of you.

Though the four unlikely boy-heroes of Huston's THE SHOTGUN RULE are into plenty of nasty stuff--drugs, thievery, language that would make a sailor blush, and duplicity of all kinds--it's hard not to like them. They are, after all, boys who love their parents, feel a desperate need to protect their bicycles and siblings alike, worry about their futures and sport an enviable, Hardy Boys-like bravery. But if the personalities of the boys are classic (and, really, boys will be boys), the crime and violence in THE SHOTGUN RULE are fiercely contemporary: meth labs, high-stakes street gangs, and moral dilemmas children should never have to face. Huston makes crime personal--even a neighborhood issue--and reveals how susceptible we all are to temptation, and how thin our veneers of respectability really are. A stunning accomplishment and a wild read that ends with a surprising note of hope for which the reader will be truly grateful!

Hold on tight for a literary ride that starts innocuously enough, with four teenage friends during the tale end of summer vacation in a 1983 working class neighborhood in Northern California. Brothers George and Andy, and best buddies Paul and Hector, while not saints by any stretch of the imagination, are certainly not gang bangers, nor are they on the FBI's most-wanted list. In fact these high school students don't even drive cars they ride bicycles. They do spend a good amount of time getting high drinking and smoking weed and dropping pills. The author describes in everyday guttural street language, the constant "busting of chops" interaction that is normal between close boys of their age. An old rivalry with the Arroyo Brothers from their soccer days, leads to younger brother Andy's bike being stolen, and the stage is set, for all that is to follow in this riveting, starkly violent, and savage, chain of events.

The boys response to the theft of Andy's bike, is to break into the Arroyo's house to get his bike back. It should be noted, that one of the Arroyo brothers has already spent hard time in jail, and the other two, have definitely, already passed the entrance requirements! While in the house, which it turns out is a "meth" lab among other things, the boys steal a kilo of "meth". That one maneuver, tips the first domino, that starts a chain reaction that doesn't stop until there are deaths, gruesome torture, injuries, and unwittingly, starts a chain of events that literally involves generations of families, that looked like respectable people,and leads all the way to the Hells Angels! You cannot put this book down till you're finished! The author has depicted this class of people explicitly .

the characters are amazing and the dialog in this book couldnt get any better...well worth the time spent reading it and i recommend it to anyone

A hardcore fan of Huston's Joe Pitt books, I was eager to try some of his other work...like his new stand-alone, The Shotgun Rule.
Once again, he did not disappoint. The word for Huston's work is REAL. He builds real characters with more depth than the Atlantic. His crackling sharp dialogue is real and gritty. It's rare to hear character in ANY book speak the way people speak in real life. He shies away from nothing, pulls no punches...and once again builds environment that you FEEL. It's these things that an author must do to make a story seem REAL.
He's a master story teller with still plenty of twists and action, and sincere moments of human drama that draw you in deeper. It seems effortless to him. Many have called Huston "hip". I can't disagree. He is hip as hell, not be confused with "fad".
The real deal, and I'll follow with author anywhere.

Hector, Paul, George and his younger brother Andy are four teen-aged friends, free from school for the summer in this coming of age novel set in the 1980's in a California suburb. The four boys - likeable enough as fictional characters - are not exactly the type of kids that you'd want living on your street. They spend their days smoking, drinking, scoring drugs and robbing their neighbor's houses. While attempting to retrieve a stolen bike from a rival, the foursome discover a meth lab and the temptation to leave empty handed is too much for one of the boys to resist.

This is the second book I have read written by Charlie Huston; I like his writing, a lot. (This surprises me since I'm not usually a fan of overt and extreme violence.) He is a talented writer and pulls off coarse language and violence very well.

The Shotgun Rule kept me turning pages; I only awarded it four stars instead of five because, for me, it was a little too much teen-aged angst for an adult novel.

Charlie Huston's trilogy, starting with "Six Bad Things" about the young man turned killer was terrific. It was a tad on the unbelieveable side - the regular guy turned killer, but was very well written and filled with exciting action.

In "Shotgun Rule" Huston matures. The characters are swept up in events in a totally believeable manner and almost totally beyond their control. They are not superhuman and do nothing above and beyond their abilities - or weaknesses.

The "stars" are four boys, three about 17 and the fourth the younger brother. They are bored during the summer vacation and like to get stoned. This means a need for cash, so they start burglarizing houses. When they stumble upon a meth lab, they are way over their heads.

The violence gets graphic, but it is appropriate for the characters that populate the book. The tension starts early with a mere stolen bike and then grows and grows in intensity. The reader is swept into the hopeless plight of the teens.

Mr. Huston blurs the lines of good and evil - how can you root for these punk kids - and there are no purely "good" characters; just gradations of bad. Huston's genius is that this does not put the reader off.

The book is extremely well-written, as well-written as book you will find in this genre. The author has the talent to keep a scene in one room of a house for a few hours stretch into a hundred pages of intensity that reads as if there were non-stop action.

This book is highly recommended. However, as noted, the violence is graphic and vividly portrayed. Although it is never gratuitous, the violent sceses are not for those with weak stomaches.

First things first-
Is there anyone in the literary world who has cooler book titles than Huston? The Shotgun Rule? Half the Blood of Brooklyn? C'mon now, if there is such an author, point me their way. I have to see that to believe it.

On to the story-
Huston branches out from his Hank Thompson and Joe Pitt series with an apparent stand alone work and once again proves to me that he is indeed the Next Big Thing. Huston ranks up there with Richard Morgan and Barry Eisler on the Must Read Category in my mind.

In The Shotgun Rule Huston introduces us to four misfit characters who somehow add up to more than the sum of their parts. Their adventures in misdemeanoring graduate into beyond felony due to some fault of theirs but perhaps greater fault of the Law of Murphy. The resulting Ragnarök that ensues unleashes many secrets the town shares and no small amount of mayhem and blood.

The story is fast paced where it needs to be but isn't a mindless dash to action. The back story of the four youths is well-told. Many of us remember such days of trying your hardest to get into trouble, finding yourself instead in Trouble, and then trying even harder to get out. Huston captured perfectly a snap shot of the mindset of such a youth and the processes that gets them into trouble beyond their ability to comprehend, much less handle.

Add to that the fact that the telling of the story is done in the sparse, hard tones Huston has served up for many books now. His prose is really top-notch and he has the most realistic dialogue I've read in a long, long time.

OK, I'll just come out and say it - Charle Huston is arguably the best writer in the US today.

I can't wait to see where he goes from here.

Between the '80's soundtrack and the blood and the gore and one of the funniest bad guys I've come across in a long time, Charlie Huston's latest also has a few powerful and dramatic things to say about father-son relationships. I wish there was a way to set it up so that any time Huston writes a book, Amazon would just charge me and send it. Like, so that I don't even have to find it and put it in my "shopping cart." That's how good all his stuff is! Highly recommended.