Hitting bottom for the last time, Miami exotic dancer Sherry Parlay breaks away from the business, takes a job at a dry cleaner, and begins a relationship with a man that pushes her most violent buttons. 75,000 first printing. $60,000 ad/promo. Tour.
White trash women find a voice for the ages in Henricks's simple yet searing first novel. Sherry Parlay, 36, may be the most oversexed antiheroine in noir-a genre rife with hotblooded femmes-and she's one of the more fatale, in the first sentence here knocking her "old man" dead after he slugs her. Sherry slays two more people before her story ends, but killing isn't what she does best: "He climbed on top and I put a bite on that lower lip. We got a sweat worked up real fast. He had me lathered inside and out. He was all I could take, but I could take him over and over." The guy who just "got his" is Payne Mahoney, hunky underboss of the Miami dry cleaner where Sherry has gone to work to escape the fate of an aging stripper. The overboss is Payne's mom, who turns out also to be sleeping with Payne-a situation Sherry remedies by suffocating her rival with a plastic clothes bag. It's at this point that Hendricks's tale loses some of its power, as the plot unravels like a tossed ball of thread: Jim Thompson this author may want to be, but she isn't. Further killings and sexual betrayals seem contrived, and characters appear to act not out of natural motivation but simply to propel the increasingly predictable plot. Still, the self-loathing Sherry remains as mesmerizing as a rattler about to strike (readers' knuckles will whiten as she plays Russian roulette with a .357 magnum inserted into an orifice that isn't her mouth). And, if what Hendricks finally offers us is a one-note novel, it's a piercing one that few will forget. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Watching the noir novel go mainstream has been a painful experience, like listening to a classic R & B song covered by one of those squeaky clean white-bread groups in the fifties. Noir is no longer a worldview; it isn't even a style, really; it's a pose, an excuse to turn the lights down and smoke cigarettes. Soon, it will probably be a perfume: "Noir, for the femme fatale in you." It's so rare to encounter the real thing these days that when you do, as in Hendricks' sledgehammer of a first novel, the effect is all the more intense: "Hank was drunk and he slugged me--it wasn't the first time--and I picked up the radio and caught him across the forehead with it. It was one of those big boom boxes with the cassette player and recorder, but I didn't think it would kill him."
That's the first sentence in the story of Sherri Parlay, a topless dancer who tries, in her fashion, to go straight. Like the doomed heroes in a James M. Cain or Jim Thompson novel, though, Sherri isn't going anywhere but down. A job at a dry cleaner called Miami Purity seems safe enough, a symbolic step out of the night life, but the boss lady has a son, a cute son, and before the postman can ring even once, the sexual heat makes the steam rising from the pressing machines seem like an ocean breeze. The most memorable noir heroes, even the most depraved of them, all seek purity; when they don't find it, the killers inside them are unleashed. Hendricks makes unflinching use of the archetypal noir story--flawed character in a flawed world wants more, gets less--but she does it in a voice that's all her own: matter-of-fact yet outrageously funny, grotesque yet discordantly tender. This is no ordinary first novel: when Sherri Parlay enters a room, you pay attention. Bill Ott
