Like almost all the other authors I’ve written about on this blog, Manny and I met on Twitter. I think we were following each other before I sent out the call for book recommendations – but he did respond to my call with his own book, Dead Dogs.
Book Details
- Moonshine Cove Press
- 151 Pages
- 6×9 dimensions
- $14 price point
- Matte cover with glue binding.
Summary
“There are bodies to be disposed of and all the local dumpsters are full. There are armed terrorists in the backseat … and they’re all smoking sherm. Yuppies have taken over East Atlanta, and the drug dealers are at war…
Read the misadventures of two Atlanta misfits involved with a circus of outlaws and revolutionaries, coerced into various criminal activities.”
Review
So, I want to acknowledge something. One day, while I was reading this, Manny just so happened to tweet that English wasn’t his first language – that he had to learn it as he grew up. That bit of intel forced me to sit back in my chair and blink rapidly. English is hard enough to learn how to speak, but to write it (and write it well) — the odds are against you.
This dude wrote an entire god-damn novel in a language that he had to learn — and wrote it well enough for me to not even question whether or not he was a native speaker. God DAMN! Manny, you got the biggest set of brass balls I’ve ever encountered — and I mean that in the best possible of ways.
Moving on to the story —
Dead Dogs is a WILD ride! My head was spinning throughout the entire book, the most common questions being: What the fuck is going on?! Who the fuck is this?! What the fuck just happened?! Where the fuck are we?! What…. the… FUCK?!!! To say this book is dizzying is the understatement of the century. It’s fast-paced, it’s gritty, it’s good. If you dig pulp, grit lit, transgressive fiction — you’ll love the hell out of this.
I do, however, want to point out a MAJOR miss for me — the editing.
This book jumps backwards and forwards in time – think of a Guy Richie movie – and while there are three parts to the book it NEEDS to have individual chapters to help that transition between time and space be more definitive and obvious to the reader. There were many times I had to flip backward to figure out the timeline of events – which was frustrating because it slowed the pace of the book.
Like I said, this is not a writing problem – the writing is good and solid – this is an editing problem, and that falls at the feet of Moonshine Cove. The editing just fucked this book for me — and I’m pretty pissed about that because it’s a damn good story.
I really look forward to the sequel to this book, which will be published by Outcast Press next year (I believe). I trust their editors, and know that what comes next in the Dead Dogs series will be amazing!
Now, don’t be a dickhead buy Dead Dogs here.
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