Amazon.com Review
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. The best thing about reading a Huston novel is that you never see it coming--laughter, tears, the passing urge to vomit--everything is a surprise, creating a wholly unsettling and exciting reading experience. The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death has all the makings of a perfect Charlie Huston novel--the down-but-not-out antihero, the outrageous supporting characters (each of whom deserves their own spin-off), the very bad situation involving money and violence, and the hilariously inappropriate dialogue that is Huston's signature--but with one surprising addition, hope. It does little good to break down the plot of a book this bizarre and brilliant. You're just going to have to trust us (and our Guest Reviewer, Stephen King), and read it. --_Daphne Durham_
Amazon Exclusive: Stephen King Reviews The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death
Stephen King is the author of too many bestselling books to name here, but some of our favorites include: The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death below.
For more from Charlie Huston, check out his "true stories about messes I've seen, helped clean up, and made" on Amazon's books blog,
There are some things you never wonder about until someone--usually someone whose mind lives on Weird Street--brings them to your attention. Who cuts the barbers hair? How does a guy wind up with the job of test-smelling armpits for a deoderant company? Or de-wrinkling dress shoes before theyre put on sale? Why does one kid become a college dean while another grows up to be a key grip? And just what is a key grip, anyway?
Heres another one. Who scrubs down the scene after a spectacularly messy death--a guy who shoots himself in the head, lets say, or dies of natural causes in a hot back room and then goes undiscovered for a couple of weeks? What sort of janitorial problems would such work entail? It turns out there are firms that specialize in those problems, and in the Weird Street world of Charlie Huston, a couple of these companies might even do battle over the smelly, maggoty spoils of war.
Trauma scene and waste cleaning is a growth industry, remarks Po Sin, the owner/operator of Clean Team. The observation comes early in Charlie Hustons terrific new novel, which is about just what the title suggests: getting rid of the messy stuff after the deal goes down.
When The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death opens, Webster Fillmore Goodhue--another in a long line of likeably slack Huston protagonists--is sponging off his friend Chev, who runs a sleazier-than-thou tattoo parlor. Enter the proprietor of Clean Team, who knows Web from Webs previous life as an elementary school teacher (a career that ended badly). Po Sin needs help in his particular growth-industry. Web agrees to a little blood- and brain-scrubbing not because he particularly wants a job but because hes suffered his own trauma and finds cleaning up other peoples end-of-life messes strangely soothing.
Enter Soledad, a beautiful young girl whose father just aired out his brains with a 9mm. Also enter Jaime, her half-bright half-brother who imagines himself a Hollywood playa but cant get out of his own way. There are many things to love about Charlie Hustons fiction--hes a brilliant storyteller, and writes the best dialogue since George V. Higgins--but what pushes my personal happy-button is his morbid sense of humor and seemingly effortless ability to create scary/funny bad guys who make Beavis and Butthead look like Rhodes Scholars.
There are a lot of those in this book, and several I-cant-believe-I-laughed-at-that scenes of grue (I cant even talk about the pipe-bomb thing, not on a family website), but the best thing about Mystic Arts is how decency and heroism rise to the top in spite of everyones best efforts to crush them under heel.
Web wanders from the nightmarish underworld of body clean-up into the equally nightmarish worlds of hijacking and smuggling; he endures cross, double-cross, and triple-cross; he pees his pants while trying to shield his girlfriend from a bullet. Hes scared but never cowardly, down but never completely out. He is, in short, a guy worth watching.
Sos Charlie Huston. Hes written several very good books (including the Caught Stealing trilogy and the Joe Pitt novels, which concern a PI whos also a vampire), but this is the first authentically great one, a runaway freight that feels like a combination of William Burroughs and James Ellroy. Mystic Arts is, however, fiercely original--very much its own thing.
Besides, admit it: youve always wanted to know how to get blood out of a deep-pile carpet.
From Publishers Weekly
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.)
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