The Shotgun Rule: A Novel [Kindle Edition]

Charlie Huston (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. One of the crime genre's rising stars, Huston (Six Bad Things) delivers a stunning, darkly comic coming-of-age novel, set in the summer of 1983 in an unnamed Northern California town. Four teenage boys, out of school and experimenting with drugs, booze and sex, find trouble fast when they break into the home of the notorious Arroyo brothers to retrieve a stolen bicycle. In the process, they stumble on the Arroyo family's main operation, a meth lab. In a classic moment of naïve bravado, they steal part of the stash, setting off a downward spiral of events that will reopen the door to the town's dark past, when an earlier generation of criminals, including one of the boy's fathers, controlled the streets. Huston's natural gift for dialogue shines as he recreates the language of teenage males, in all its crude and often hilarious glory. Most importantly, Huston has the courage to both unsettle and entertain the reader, and his story resonates long after its disturbing final scenes. Author tour. (Aug.)
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From Booklist

In his first stand-alone thriller, Huston explores a 1980s suburban California milieu similar to the one that set the stage for his wonderful Hank Thompson trilogy: teenage screwups chasing away the summertime blues by engaging in minor-league mayhem. Here, four white-bread friends who smoke pot and pilfer neighbors' jewelry tangle with a trio of hardcase Hispanic brothers who stash their youngest pal's bike in their crank lab/chop shop. The fast-unfolding plot's tension springs from elements both expected (the fine line between youthful indiscretions and life-ruining mistakes) and surprising (how the kids' actions unearth a long-buried feud involving their parents). Huston demonstrates a great feel for characters on the cusp of maturity—which helps readers connect with their adolescent aches even when they're being a pain. But just when it seems this might be a mislabeled YA yarn, the book delivers a fully realized elder generation as well. Huston also manages to minimize the racially charged aspects of the teen showdown by making one member of the foursome a Latino punk rocker who steals more than his share of scenes. Sennett, Frank

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Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 237 KB
• Print Length: 258 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0345481356
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (August 28, 2007)
• Sold by: Random House Digital, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B000UZJQ32
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #158,620 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

More About the Author

Charlie Huston is the author of the bestsellers The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death and The Shotgun Rule, as well as the Henry Thompson trilogy, the Joe Pitt casebooks, and several titles for Marvel Comics. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the summer's most impressive books, August 28, 2007

By 

David Montgomery "Book Critic" (davidjmontgomery.com) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Shotgun Rule: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Coming of Age in Hell, August 31, 2007

By 

Gary Griffiths (Los Altos Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Shotgun Rule: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wild Read, A Wild Ride, circa 1983...., August 28, 2007

By 

Laura Benedict - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Shotgun Rule: A Novel (Hardcover)

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!