Galveston

I’d walked into the bar first, but the tinsel around the bottle island looked too gaudy and the slope-eye of the waitress came out of the shadows like an anglerfish materializing from the darkest part of the ocean.

This was a depressing crime novel with beautiful, depressing prose about mostly depressing places. And to quote the book summary marketing blurb in the book itself:

“Roy Cady is working as a strong-arm man for a low-level New Orleans gangster when two events change his life: he’s diagnosed with terminal cancer, and his boss puts out a hit on him. Soon enough, Roy and a young prostitute, Rocky—thrown together after a blood-spattered encounter with the would-be hit men—are on the run, traveling from New Orleans to Galveston.”

Roy tries to be a good guy in Galveston but his previous life of crime has a momentum and heft that are too densely obstinate for his spirit of reform to overcome. Bad things happen and we know from the structure of the book that in 15 years he winds up a wounded character with a dog for companionship who is living cheap in a south texas coastal apartment worried that his past will catch up to him.

Long story short: come for the prose, stick around for a while absorbing the vibe and then maybe look for something more cheerful.