Country: USA
Genre: Crime/Noir
Pages: 237 kb (eOriginal)
Buy It Here
You can have what's left of me.
This is not your average crime fiction with gun-wielding maniacs, drifters, prostitutes and other shady characters. No, leave these expectations at the door, when you're starting on Keith Rawson's THE CHAOS WE KNOW. It's not exactly a group-hug kind of book either. No, it's just tuned to a different frequency than what you might've experienced from noir, so far. THE CHAOS WE KNOW, in its narratives as well as in the bare structure of its writing, read like a symphony played out of tune. They are great stories for sure, but they feel like more than that. Keith Rawson frequently* messes with the structure and conventional tropes of crime fiction and creates something new out of it. You know those crazy men who create gigantic statues and other gorgeous works of art out of recycled materials? That's what THE CHAOS WE KNOW felt to me. A reflexive experiment on a genre. A successful one that is.
Keith Rawson has this mind-bending, completely unique ability to take a tired idea of crime fiction and give it a new life by banging its structure into a new shape. For example, one of my favorite stories was the title short, THE CHAOS WE KNOW, where a man loses his job and slides into the wrong path, which you gradually discover he has experienced before. It's a brilliant, intimate, almost Carveresque depiction of the negative feelings commonly associated to noir. You keep expecting the protagonist to do something stupid and he does, but he doesn't do what you expect. It's a story where the guns are kept into their holsters, but it feels a lot gloomier this way. You will find the comparison to Carver relevant through many aspects of Rawson's fiction, even through his titles such as: WHAT I LOST ALONG WITH MY KEYS and THE SONS OF GREATNESS TAKE IT IN THE ASS. But it's like Carver's artistic sensibility crashed into Johnny Cash's and created this new being**.
Another thing I liked about THE CHAOS WE KNOW was that Keith Rawson, not unlike Heath Lowrance has this knack for shaping damaged characters. Both guys understand damage is about a lot more than a dead girlfriend and yet both have a very different take on it. While Lowrance's protagonists are emotionally wrecked from an unstoppable fate, Rawson's often only have themselves to blame for this physical and mental breakdowns. Their poor health often results in bad life choices and this is where Rawson picks up. When the baggage gets unbearably heavy and a character can't do anything else but to go further into the wrong path. And it had a wide array of subjects here. MR. JIM'S BIG NIGHT OUT and FLAMING SHITS have to be the most efficient cautionary tales against crank use ever written as stories like THE REFERRAL SYSTEM have a more universal frame of reference like the causality in between loneliness and regrets.
I pulled my gun and fire a wad off into his chest. The shot wouldn't have killed him-he was wearing Kevlar, you could tell- but the stupid shit had to act all dramatic and throw his body into oncoming traffic. A sixteen wheeler rolled past just as the highway cop threw himself backwards and he became another bug splattered across the grill of the semi.
That's the kind of savage beauty scattered across THE CHAOS WE KNOW, but as much as I enjoyed the pure brutality of those images, the collection is not articulated around creating those moments and that's what made them so spontaneous and enjoyable. These are stories written about the characters that die around page fifty in any conventional crime fiction novel. Rawson gives them a voice, a life, experiences of their own. That makes THE CHAOS WE KNOW one of the most off-beat, unpredictable short story collection and it's a welcome change of pace. The world of Keith Rawson has no heroes and very little hope and really, a unique, intimate point of view of what it is for somebody to lose the control of his/her life. Kudos to Snubnose Press for publishing something so dark, because we need more books like this that questions the form and the traditions of a genre.
* And by that I mean, at least once in every story
** Does that even make any sense?