Love and Other Wounds

May 4, 2015
Each one of the stories in Harper’s slim debut collection goes off like a shotgun blast of crime fiction tropes: convicts, skinheads, meth mouths, dog fights, crooked cops, barflies, and botched robberies. Doomed men and desperate women paint themselves into increasingly tight corners, where the only choice left is to come out shooting, like a hillbilly Butch Cassidy. Some stories connect dots: the skinhead who takes on a local legend in “I Wish They Never Named Him Mad Dog” is the same man whose failure to show up for a drug deal in “Always Thirsty” allows a gang of Midwestern Bosnians to disembowel the guy who did. Aryan Steel makes more than one appearance, as does Jackie Blue’s, a dive bar with more blood on the floor than booze. “Playing Dead” shifts the action to Brooklyn, where a coke dealer cheats death but takes responsibility for a deal gone wrong by cleaning up the mess—with a chainsaw. And “Beautiful Trash” sets another mess cleaner on a collision course with a publicist for A-list celebrities who are spiraling out of control in the City of Angels. At 17 pages, this is the book’s longest story, ending on the deepest emotional note. But the entire collection is a tight, tough parcel of pulpy, high-octane tales. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber.

May 1, 2015
Criminals, lowlifes, and losers-many of them also quixotic romantics-people Harper's first collection of short stories, which are set mostly in the Ozarks with side trips to cities like Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Detroit. In the opener, "Agua Dulce," a meth addict's debt comes due and he realizes how far he'll go to protect his child from his merciless dealer and his cronies in Aryan Steel, a group that makes the Aryan Nation look mild. Ironically, in a later story, "Heart Check," a new prison inmate and Steel wannabe, recently convicted of killing a child, discovers that he may have misunderstood the Steel code. But in none of these stories is the moral code exactly mainstream, from "Prove It All Night," about a 17-year-old Missouri girl whose robbery spree with her older boyfriend ends badly for him, to "Lucy in the Pit," about a fight-dog trainer whose loyalty to a dog is tested by the animal's owner, to "Your Finest Moment," about a policeman plotting revenge on a fellow cop he's caught in bed with his girlfriend. Bar owner and retired rural gangster Jackie Blue is a minor character in the almost comic "I Wish They Never Named Him Mad Dog," in which a nickname turns a loser into a tough into a dead body, and takes center stage in "Red Hair and Black Leather" when an enticing young woman asks for his protection against her biker ex; Blue may be old but he's smarter and tougher than any other character in the book. Certainly smarter than the narrator of the title story, who sets a dog on his loved one, already bleeding to death from a bullet wound after a botched robbery, in order to save him. "Beautiful Trash" is set in a different but perhaps even more morally bankrupt milieu, celebrity-strewn LA, where covering up the stars' dirty scandals is a business that can ruin more ordinary lives. Bottom-line survival competes hard against issues of loyalty, friendship, and family in this disturbing, sometimes-ugly version of reality.

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April 1, 2015

Raw, gritty, and unsettling, the stories in Harper's debut collection feature tough lives lived mostly on the edge, from John, running through bullets and high-desert wildfire from his own freshly dug grave; to Mark, cut down in a firefight with the cops after robbing a gas station; to Palmer, determined to save Lucy, severely injured in a dog-fighting ring. VERDICT As he runs, John's mouth "felt full of hot pennies," and every story here is a hot penny worth much more. For fans of Cormac McCarthy, Daniel Woodrell, and Bruce Machart.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2015
This collection of short stories won't necessarily put the author in the company of Daniel Woodrell, but it's a damn fine debut. In taut and bloody vignettes, several with recurring mentions of locations or characters, Harper gets inside the heads of dog fighters, drug dealers, drug-deal watchdogs, bar owners, bank robbers, and other no-hopers in the not-necessarily-rural Ozarks (and several other locations). These stories are brutal, but where some country-noir authors seem to skate on blood, guts, and meth, what sets Harper apart is his ability to deliver genuine literary epiphanies amid the pulverized heads. For every bravura set piece (flaming cattle in Agua Dulce ), there's a compact character study (an obese jewelry-store employee in Like Riding a Moped ); for each piece of gory slapstick (a bank robbery gone horribly awry in Plan C ), there's a story that makes the repugnant seem honorable (a tenderhearted dogman in Lucy in the Pit ). Harper delivers tension, action, black humor, sex, and violencebut, above all, characters we quickly know, understand, and still remember even after their brains have painted the walls.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)