Kill Kill Faster Faster - Hardcover

Rose, Joel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0517708191 ISBN 13: 9780517708194

Publisher: Crown, 1997

Synopsis

oey One-Way doesn't believe he'll ever leave prison, until hotshot producer Markie Mann pulls strings to spring Joey after he's served 17 years for killing his young wife. While in prison, Joey has written a play that has since become a Broadway sensation. But when Joey falls for Markie's wife, Fleur, there's real trouble.

About this title

About the Author:

JOEL ROSE has co-authored graphic novels, his journalism has appeared in the New York Times and he has written for several television shows including Kojak and Miami Vice. He established and co-edited the legendary literary magazine Between C & D, and his first novel was Kill the Poor. He lives in New York City.

From The New Yorker:

Kill Kill Faster Faster should be set to a pantherlike Lou Reed bass line: It's one of his songs come to life as a novel. It's very, very good and -- even more unbelievable for a Lower East Side novel --- IT'S REALLY HARD TO PUT DOWN! If the whole downtown sensibility seems to have become as dry and weightless as old newspaper lately, KILL KILL redeems it with a sorrowful beauty.

Joey One Way, Rose's narrator, is the new voice of downtown, one who knows how to sing in many of the old voices of that terrain -- ex-junkie, barrio literary hipster, mournful poet, jailhouse diarist, noir detective. Joey has just got out of jail for killing his beautiful black wife in a junkie fever 17 and a half years before and he's scared and jittery.

There are other characters -- Markie the producer who gets Joey released from prison to work on his TV projects, and Fleur, Markie's girlfriend, who is soon Joey's lover. I'd like to say the rolling paper-thin dimensions of both Markie and Fleur result from an addict's self-absorption, but the truth is Rose just isn't up to fleshing them out. His eye is on Joey.

As a result Kill Kill Faster Faster is pretty much a one-shot deal. There isn't much development -- our narrator's relationships to both Fleur and Markie are basically the same in the end as they are in the beginning. But Joey's entrancing rap fills up the book.

Joey spend it's 212 pages trying not to be driven crazy by (a) &@!! (specifically the lovely Fleur's; (b) memory; and (c) desire for some kind of salvation. The prose is colloquial but with a flourish: "And what am I angry about?" Joey thinks. "You know, I don't have a clue. Not a clue. Or I ain't talking. One or the other." It also has the drum-drum-drum rhythm of a drug craving. It gets in your blood.

Rose has been an Alphabet City literary fixture for years -- he cofounded the literary mag BETWEEN C&D (set to be relaunched this fall) and wrote a previous novel, the cult fave Kill the Poor. With Kill Kill Faster Faster, he emerges from the direction of Avenue D walking like the baddest white boy seen around here in years.

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0517708191
• ISBN 13: 9780517708194
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 212