Blacktop Wasteland
S.A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland tells the story of Beauregard “Bug” Montage, an auto mechanic who, following some financial setbacks, finds himself returning to the life of crime he thought he’d left behind. As straightforward as that premise might be, this novel is anything but, and I thoroughly enjoyed how it is (as with many things in this book) more than it appears.
What I love crime fiction and noir specifically is the interplay between surface and substance. It’s a recurring theme in this book: Beauregard is a family man and small business owner, but there is more to him than meets the eye. That much is clear from the opening chapter, which features a drag race. He is also a skilled getaway driver and ex-con, one burdened with a dark past that he can’t let go of. The more time I spent with him, the more I saw layers to personality and history, and I understand the choices he makes, even when I don’t agree with them. Why he chooses to go back to a life of crime, why he follows through with certain promises he has kept, why he doesn’t keep others. The book is not interested in giving straightforward answers about Beauregard, and to the very end, both the reader and the character are left with a weighty sense of ambiguity as to what kind of person he truly is. Blacktop Wasteland is a great character study, and that’s another one of the ways that it gave me something more than what meets the eye.
Aside from all that, it’s got a cast of indelible characters and a sense of place that feels authentic and inhabited. It also has propulsive action scenes that made me think, oh, this is what The Fast and the Furious would be like in book form! The pace revs up especially in the last third, where the events escalate in a way that I marveled at as a reader, and that I want to emulate as a writer.
Photo by Meritt Thomas on Unsplash
Other things I’ve read lately:
I finally started the bestselling, award-winning The Murderbot Diaries series with All Systems Red by Martha Wells. Murderbot’s character and voice really drew me in and made me want to get to know them more, so it’s good that there are five more books in the series (so far).
Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is the type of short story collection that I go bonkers for. Every story is so well-written and complicated, and the collection deftly straddles the line between realism and speculative fiction. Most of all, the stories present a distinct point of view about the world and the way we live now.
If you loved Call Me By Your Name, The Line of Beauty, Maurice, Giovanni’s Room, or What Belongs to You (as I did), then you might like Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski. It’s a gay coming-of-age love story set in Communist Poland, and it’s as heartbreaking as that premise sounds.