The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death: A Novel - Hardcover

Huston, Charlie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 034550111X ISBN 13: 9780345501110

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2009

Synopsis

With his teaching career derailed by tragedy and his slacker days numbered, Webster Fillmore Goodhue makes an unlikely move and joins Clean Team, charged with tidying up L.A.'s grisly crime scenes. For Web, it's a steady gig, and he soon finds himself sponging a Malibu suicide's brains from a bathroom mirror and flirting with the man's bereaved and beautiful daughter.

Then things get weird: The dead man's daughter asks a favor. Every cell in Web's brain tells him to turn her down, but something makes him hit the Harbor Freeway at midnight to help her however he can. Soon enough it's Web who needs the help when gun-toting California cowboys start showing up on his doorstep. What's the deal? Is it something to do with what he cleaned up in that motel room in Carson? Or is it all about the brewing war between rival trauma cleaners? Web doesn't have a clue, but he'll need to get one if he's going to keep from getting his face kicked in. Again. And again. And again.

About this title

About the Author

Charlie Huston is the author of The Shotgun Rule, the Henry Thompson trilogy: Caught Stealing, Six Bad Things (an Edgar Award nominee), and A Dangerous Man, and the Joe Pitt novels: Already Dead, No Dominion, Half the Blood of Brooklyn, and Every Last Drop. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the actress Virginia Louise Smith.

www.pulpnoir.com

Reviews

Mystic Arts—which critics agree just may push Charlie Huston into crime fiction's mainstream—may not appeal to readers who cringe at violent, bloody scenes or profane language. Still, "if one tends to find humor in unlikely places," noted the Denver Post, "Huston has created a work that is sly, twisted and surprising—one well worth the investment of time." All critics praised the excellent characterization ("brazen originals") and sharp, witty dialogue (that of "a death-defying talent") (Washington Post). Some stock plotting dampened a couple of reviews, but critics took delight in Huston's serious, if understated, themes about friendship, life, death.
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

Starred Review. Noir master Huston (The Shotgun Rule) should win himself a whole new audience with this bizarre and utterly grotesque stand-alone, told mostly through dialogue that highlights the author's uncanny ear for the spoken word. Former Los Angeles grade school teacher Web Goodhue, now a full-time slacker suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, falls into a job on a crime scene cleanup crew, scrubbing up the remains of the recently deceased. After the crew has finished cleaning up a messy suicide scene in Malibu, Web gets a phone call from the dead man's daughter, Soledad. She and her thug half-brother have another big mess on their hands that needs cleaning, on the QT. Unable to resist the beautiful Soledad, Web soon finds himself in way over his head. Huston, one of his generation's finest and hippest talents, shows in grisly detail what cleaning up after the dead entails. This one should appeal to Chuck Palahniuk fans as well as hard-boiled crime readers. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Romanticizing the knockaround lives of aimless young Southern Californians as he did in his last stand-alone novel, The Shotgun Rule (2007) and, to a certain extent, in the delightful Hank Thompson trilogy that launched his career, Huston here focuses on Webster Fillmore Goodhue, the twentysomething son of a gonzo novelist gone to seed and a hippie mother gone to weed. Paralyzed by a traumatic incident that led him to give up his teaching gig and launch a second career as a world-class jerk, Web seems to have finally found his calling when he signs on with a crime-scene cleaning service. But when a beautiful customer begs him to sanitize a bloody hotel room before the cops show up, Web jumps back on the path to self-destruction. Readers likely will be charmed enough by the literate, funny, and sensitive Web to care about whether he cleans up his act. And while the criminals he tangles with—as well as the misfit cleaning crew he runs with—may be incidental to the plot, they give Huston plenty of opportunities to create his signature witty mayhem. --Frank Sennett

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I’m not sure where one should expect to find the bereaved daughter of a wealthy Malibu suicide in need of a trauma cleaner long after midnight, but safe to say a trucker motel down the 405 industrial corridor in Carson was not on my list of likely locales.

—Ouch. That looks painful.

I touched the bandage on my forehead.

—And if that’s what it feels like to look at it, imagine how it feels to actually have it happen to you.

The half of her face that I could see in the chained gap at the edge of the door nodded.

—Yeah, I’d imagine that sucks.

Cars whipped past on the highway across the parking lot, taking full advantage of the few hours in any given Los Angeles county twenty-four hour period when you might get the needle on the high side of sixty. I watched a couple of them attempting to set a new land speed record. I looked back at Soledad’s face, bisected by the door.

—So?

—Uh huh?

I hefted the plastic carrier full of cleaning supplies I’d brought from the van.

—Someone called for maid service?

—Yeah. That was me.

—I know.

She fingered the slack in the door chain, set it swinging back and forth.

—I didn’t really think you’d come.

—Well, I like to surprise.

She stopped playing with the chain.

—Terrible habit. Don’t you know most people don’t like surprises?

I looked over at the highway and watched a couple more cars.

—Can I ask a silly question?

—Sure.

I looked back at her.

—What the fuck am I doing here?

She ran a hand through her hair, let it fall back over her forehead.

—You sure you want to do this, Web?

That being the kind of question that tips most people off to a fucked up situation, I could very easily have taken it as my cue to go downstairs, get back in the van and get the hell gone. But it’s not like I hadn’t already been clued to things being fucked up when she called in the middle of the night and asked me to come to a motel to clean a room. And there I was anyway. So who was I fooling?

Exactly no one.

—Just let me in and show me the problem.

—Think you can fix it, do you?

I shook my head.

—No, probably not. But it’s cold out here. And I came all this way. She showed me half her smile, the other half hidden behind the door.

—And you’re still clinging to some hope that a girl asking you to come clean something is some kind of booty call code, right?

I rubbed the top of my head. But I didn’t say anything. Not feeling like saying no and lying to her so early in our relationship. There would be time for that kind of thing later. There’s always time for lying.

She inhaled, let it out slow.

—OK.

The door closed. I heard the chain unhook. The door opened and I walked in, my feet crunching on something hard.

—This the asshole?

I looked at the young dude standing at the bathroom door with a meticulously crafted fauxhawk. I looked at bleached teeth and handcrafted tan. I looked at the bloodstains on his designer-distressed jeans and his artfully faded reproduction Rolling Stones concert T from a show that took place well before he was conceived. Then I looked at much larger bloodstains on the sheets of the queen-size bed and the flecks of blood spattered on the wall. I looked at the floor to see what I’d crushed underfoot, half expecting cockroaches, and found dozens of scattered almonds instead. I listened as the door closed behind me and locked. I watched as Soledad walked toward the bathroom and the dude snagged her by the hand before she could go in.

—I asked, Is this the asshole.

I pointed at myself.

—Honestly, in most circumstances, in any given room on any given day, I’d say, Yeah, I’m the asshole here. But in this particular scenario, and I know we just met and all, but in this room here?

I pointed at him.

—I’m more than willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and say that you’re the asshole.

He looked at Soledad.

—So, yeah, he’s the asshole then?

She twisted her hand free and went into the bathroom.

—He’s the guy I told you about.

She closed the door behind her.

He looked at me.

—Yeah, you’re the asshole alright.

I held up a hand.

—Hey, look, if you’re gonna insist, I can only accept the title. But seriously, don’t sell yourself short. You got the asshole thing locked up if you want it. He came down the room in a loose strut I imagine had been meticulously
assembled from endless repeat viewings of Tom Cruise’s greatest hits.

—Yeah, I can tell by the way you’re talking. You’re the one fucked with her today. Made jokes about her dad killing himself. You’re the asshole alright. The toilet flushed, Soledad yelled over it.

—He didn’t make jokes!

The dude looked at the closed door.

—You said he made jokes.

He looked at me.

—Asshole. Fucking go in someone’s home, there’s been a tragedy, go in and try to make money off that. Fucking vulture. Fucking ghoul. Who does that, who comes up with that for a job? That your dream job, man? Cleaning up dead people? Other kids were hoping to grow up to be movie stars and you were having fantasies about scooping people’s guts off the floor?

I shifted, crushing a few more almonds.

—Truth is, mostly I had fantasies about doing your mom.

He slipped a lozenge of perforated steel from his back pocket, flicked his wrist and thumb in an elaborate show of coordination, and displayed the open butterfly knife resting on his palm.

—Say what, asshole?

Say nothing, actually. Except say that maybe he was right and I was the asshole in the room. Certainly being an asshole was how I came to be there in the first place.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 034550111X
• ISBN 13: 9780345501110
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336