Customer Reviews

Wild Turkey

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

 

 

This is like John MacDonald updated to our times--middle class guy with great marriage gets into deep trouble with adultery, murder, and the whole shebang. Hemmingson, previously known for editing anthologies of erotic literature, here does a great job with prose smooth as silk. The tale is of Phil Lansdale, former lawyer now disbarred, who finds out his married neighbor, Cassandra Payne, is one swell looking babe and pursues his need to scratch that itch in spite of a wife who digs him a lot.

Phil starts drinking and doing stuff he never did before. He gets buddy-buddy with another neighbor, a retired cop, who thinks Cassandra may have done something pretty nasty. Of course this doesn't stop Phil from letting his pants go where his head shouldn't.

As Phil gets more and more involved in finding out who Cassandra is and what she may have done, things get worse and worse. The plot is fast and sharp; the momentum is powerful, and the action is intense.

Because Hemmingson's writing is so carefully controlled, you can read this in one afternoon or less. A great addition to the continuing availability of excellent modern noir fiction that also includes The Ice Harvest by Scott Phillips and The 25th Hour by David Benioff.

David Lynch should make this book into a movie. Or one of Lynch's many cronies. This book screams, "I'm movie material!" No joke.

I was blown away by Hemmingson's Wild Turkey. Just when you think you have the story figured out, he throws a curveball at you.

Let's just say I didn't get to sleep until way past my bedtime as I read this little gem of a novel.

Highly recommended reading.

Be prepared for this one! Twists, turns, shocks -- violence, yearnings, and even a lot of sadness.

I have read a number of Hemmingson's books, from his erotic The Naughty Yard to the flawed SF thriller Minstrels to the weird anthologies he's edited, and the many novellas and stories of his I see in anthologies all over the place. I have to say Wild Turkey is his best yet. He's moved from the small press to commercial New York publishers, and this is a good thing.

The protagonist isn't the best hero you could find, but he's human, he's real -- he makes mistakes, and he makes them big. That's what's so refreshing about this "contemporary noir" novel: the hero isn't a tough private eye or Jack Nicholson charcater. He's an everyday Joe...or Phil.

This is a great book for those one-night sittings, maybe even a one-night stand. I look forward to Hemmingson's next book from Forge.

"Wild Turkey" is so bad that it's kind of great. It's so silly, random and knowingly cheap that it's like some divine piece of comedic gold.

Fully in late-night-cable treatment mode, Hemmingson whips through a tale of three horny neighborhood guys who sit around drinking all day while watching the comings and goings of their hot, miniskirted English neighbor. Her husband ends up murdered and the men, one an ex-cop, take it upon themselves to investigate the crime. Our narrator, Phil, who has been watching the woman obsessively, soon finds himself inside her bedroom.

From there, all sorts of improbable things happen -- death, hit men murder people, tragedies, infidelity, alcoholism, a trip to Vegas, with a brief stop-off in "Deliverance" and Tarantino land. It's like fifty bad plots stuffed into one short little novel.

I am a big fan of Hemmingson's, and I don't believe for a moment he didn't know what he was doing here. He HAD to be deliberately making a good bad novel. It all had to be purposeful. How else to explain the head-spinning ridiculousness of the ending -- as Phil tracks down Cassandra, the British woman, who of course has a big secret to reveal, and the two get involved with post-Tarantino hit men and some Lynchian wheelchair-bound dude who acts as the ethics hotline for criminals? It's so horrible it's hilarious.

The whole book -- its characters' depth, its plotting, its attempt at seriousness -- is gossamer thin. It feels less like a screenplay and more like the pitch to a treatment for a screenplay that wasn't fully formed.

But I kind of loved it. I don't normally like bad novels -- the way I do bad movies -- but this is written by a talented guy that I almost pictured at the keyboard, cackling, saying, "And watch this...!" One implausible scenario after another stacked on top of each other until it makes a pretty amusing take on this whole melodramatic genre.

Hemmingson, in a way, reminds me of Kosinski. You never knew what you were going to get from him, and sometimes he was brilliant, and other times he released real dogs (I won't even get into the idea that people said he didn't write his own books, which could explain the inconsistency). Hemmingson and Kosinski, at their best, share that ability to shock and horrify. But when they're off, they can be shockingly and horrifyingly dull.

But "Wild Turkey" (the title doesn't even have a double meaning; it is literally Cassandra's drink of choice) is so quick (I read it in a few hours) and goofy, I'll simply consider it a knowing tribute to overanxious thrillers and bad plot twists.

How can I even begin to describe this book? It starts off like many other noirish books do. A man who has fallen. He's no longer at the top of his game and neither is his marriage. I honestly can't complain about the book but I can say that it does get pretty weird. The sex is something straight out of a perverted porno and when the main characters get to Las Vegas the book does a complete 180.
I can't say that I was disappointed in this book; I didn't know what to expect. I can say that I was surprised. Imagine reading a script for the Salton Sea with some Pulp Fiction and Crying Game mixed in for good measure. Oh and lets not forget a sprinkling of David Lynch.
Overall I'd say it's worth a look but I wouldn't put it at the top of any list.

Michael Hemmingson, Wild Turkey (Forge, 2001)

I'm still not exactly sure what to make of Wild Turkey. It's a thriller, but one that shimmers with an air of defeatism; it's noir through the eyes of someone who is slowly sliding into unrecoverable depression. The result is certainly interesting, but I haven't quite figured out how effective it is.

Phil Lansdale is a disbarred lawyer, rich enough to not need to go out and work immediately, who quickly learns to adapt to a life of sitting on the front porch drinking entirely too many beers with Brian, the retired cop next door, and watching his across-the-street neighbor, young and succulent Cassandra Payne. To top it all off, Phil's son is a budding pyromaniac, and the spark has gone out of his marriage. Cassandra's husband is gunned down on his way home from the airport one day, and from there, the stage is set.

As the story is, in fact, told from the point of view of someone sliding ever deeper into alcoholism, depression, and a serious sense of unreality, the tone of the novel makes perfect sense; he's calling it as he sees it. The air of detachment applied to horrific events has a long tradition of effectiveness in literature (consider the continuing popularity of Elie Wiesel, a mediocre writer at best, but a pony whose one trick is a very, very effective one); what puts it on the edge of not working here is unclear. Perhaps the events aren't quite horrific enough, or perhaps Phil has already slid too far down that slope. Perhaps there's too much foreshadowing-- or, worse, we're so used to the conventions of noir that we know what's going to happen long before Phil does. The end result is the same, however-- predictability with a sheen of ennui.

It's fun, in a mindless-action-movie sort of way, though whether you'll find it a Schwarzenegger flick or a Jean-Claude Van Damme flick I have no idea. Turn your brain off and have a good time watching things blow up. ** ½

I agree, this book will keep your attention. Hard to put down and stays in your head for days, lots of plot twists and turns.

I enjoyed this, and stayed up all night. It was like I didn't want to look, but I had to look: an atrocity exhibition. Hemmingson keeps you turning the pages because you don't know what's going to happen next, and that's a gift. I'm curious what Hemmingson's next noir novel will be like -- just as fast paced? Just as exciting and surprising? We'll find out.

In San Diego, thirty-something Phil and Tina Lansdale seems to be on the right tract, American style. They have two children, live in a nice house, and seem to share a happy relationship. Phil is a lawyer while Tina works for the Social Security Administration. However, after a series of incidents, Phil not only losses his job, but the California bar forbids him from practicing for five years. Because of his solid investments, Phil and Tina agree that he can work as a househusband for now.

Staying home allows Phil to notice the neighborhood and even meet neighbors, something he never did before. He becomes friends with retired cop Bryan Vaughn and part-time college instructor David Larson. The trio salivates over English expatriate Cassandra Payne until someone kills her banker-husband. While Bryan and David believe Cassandra arranged a hit, Phil becomes bolder and soon begins a strange affair that he knows can only end tragically.

WILD TURKEY is a strange relationship drama focusing on an individual whose descent into moral decay is cleverly observed by the reader as one shock after another hits the nervous system. The story line is an erotic Noir that requires a one read sitting and a fifth handy. The moral collapse of Phil and Cassandra's femme fatale adds to quite a tale that requires a warning label with some of its showering golden graphic scenes. Michael Hemmingson is quickly earning the reputation by genre fans for his heady writing (see THE NAUGHTY YARD).

Harriet Klausner

Ever watch your neighbors and wonder what they're up to? Sure, it was done in "Rear Window." but this is a littke different, a little weird, a lot more violent, and a lot more sexy. The book's a little short, it reads fast, but what the heck, short books are in these days. There's a few contrived parts, a little bit of silly dialogue, but overall this is a five star book.