Tag Archives: Feral

The Epic of Dogtown

Don Winslow’s City on Fire has quotes from The Aeneid and The Iliad throughout. Those epics are about the siege of Troy, the original city on fire, so the quotes are apt. Winslow’s story is an epic as well, but his Troy is Providence, Rhode Island, the land of “I know a guy.” That’s an unexpected setting for an epic, but it works. Just substitute the ancient Greeks and Trojans for Italian and Irish mobsters in the 1980s. The Irish control the docks. The Italians control the trucks and almost everything else. The merchandise that falls off the boats and trucks supports both gangs and their respective rust belt neighborhoods. Each respects the other’s territory, meaning the Italians rarely venture into Dogtown, the name of the Irish section where slaughterhouses once attracted feral dogs.

A beautiful woman emerges from the sea on a hot summer day. Here’s our Helen, except her name is Pam, because it’s Providence. Danny Ryan knows immediately that she’s going to be trouble. “Women that beautiful usually are.” Just ask the Greeks and Trojans. Danny is in his late 20s, and his father-in-law runs the Irish gang. Danny is “faithful like a dog,” so he isn’t going to be the Paris in this story. That role is reserved for his brother-in-law, who steals Pam away from a high-ranking Italian mobster. Jokes are made at this mobster’s expense, and when “people start to disrespect you in one area of your life, it leaks into others.” The initial weapons are bats, but soon bullets fly and bodies fall. Danny moves up the chain of command. He’s never been tested like this before, and it’s going to take everything he has to get himself and his family out alive.

Mob stories make for great epics. They have all the requisites built in: violence, greed, lust, family, and loyalty. There’s just one problem. Our popular culture is rife with these stories, so it takes a talented writer to craft a captivating one that’s fresh. Fortunately, Winslow is such a writer.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor.

Child of Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God is set in the mountains of eastern Tennessee around 1965. It opens with the county auctioning off Lester’s home. “Lester Ballard never could hold his head right after that.” Then he’s falsely accused of rape. After several days in jail, the sheriff determines Lester is not guilty (he’s certainly not innocent) of this particular crime and he’s set free.

You might think Lester is a little pissed off now, and you’d be right. But not to worry, Lester is a “child of god much like yourself perhaps.” And like you perhaps, Lester becomes unmoored, feral – though in fairness he was probably always feral. He starts collecting things: stuffed animals from the fair, women’s clothing, female corpses. You know, the standard stuff anyone would collect after losing everything.

So the sheriff gets involved again, but Lester has disappeared into the mountains. The sheriff represents what passes for civilization in this “dead and fabled waste.” This is obvious because he wears “pressed and tailored” chinos, and his name is Fate (no one ever accused Cormac McCarthy of light-heartedness or subtlety). So Fate is chasing Lester in a place the “good lord didn’t intend folks to live in.” Some things just don’t change in Cormac Land, and when the sheriff is asked if he thinks people are meaner now compared to the old days, he responds predictably. “I think people are the same from the day God first made one.”

Lester is a precursor to McCarthy’s Judge Holden in Blood Meridian and Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. He’s just not as compelling as those superbly nihilistic killers. These novels share other Cormac tropes too: wild and brutal landscapes, men comfortable with random acts of violence, and civilization fighting a losing battle against viciousness.

But back to Child of God. I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise, but people die. And when someone dies, we call it fate even though fate had nothing to do with it. So fate does eventually catch up with Lester, but Fate doesn’t.

What makes men like Lester Ballard, Judge Holden, and Anton Chigurh so vicious? Is it the inhospitable environment? Something inside them? The devil? I hope you aren’t so naive as to think Cormac McCarthy is going to answer that for you.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor