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It's called Politoburg, this ramshackle camp in the middle of the desert. It's so remote and desolate, it may as well be on the moon. There's no agriculture or natural resources other than dust and lizard shit. The economy consists entirely of the goods sold from Ramon's cantina and the services of the Marias. Ramon is stocked in weekly truckloads, and Ramon sends the contents of his safe back with the drivers.
Pen-wielding wacko Jedidiah Ayres wrote a story, a long time ago, about an interloper hellhole in the middle of Nowhere, Mexico called Politoburg. The place must have grown on him, because he decided to revisit it for his first novella FIERCE BITCHES. If you don't know who Ayres is, you probably don't keep up with crime fiction actualities. He's a passionate advocate of everything artistically violent, the main driving force behind the Noir at the Bar series of authors reading, the pen behind Hardboiled Wonderland and a fearless and singular noirist himself. I thought I had him figures out at a writer, but FIERCE BITCHES proved me wrong. The mind of Jedidiah Ayres works in mysterious ways.
Like I said, Politoburg. You don't want to go there. In fact, you're not supposed to be there, unless you fucked up or someone in your family tree did. FIERCE BITCHES explores the wildlife of the burg, which consist in American felons down on their lucks, whores and people who call it home. They don't coexist very well. The nameless American wants to leave * and plans to make a statement doing so, Maria wants to leave her life and Ramon, the city constudian, wants to keep Politoburg together by any means necessary. That means eradicating the possibility of someone even wanting to leave by being very clear about the consequences. It's not pretty.
While FIERCE BITCHES is a whopping seventy-four pages, it's loaded. There are multiple protagonists, including one narrated at the second person singular, something I haven't seen since reading Michel Butor's Second Thoughts. Sets an uncanny mood. The dry, disembodied prose reminded me of Cormac McCarthy and I am not exaggerating here. Ayres shows the same detachment and simplicity in describing complete horror, once again confirming my hypothesis that maximum horror factor is attainable by establishing a distance with your characters. Ayres doesn't characterize enough over this short novella to equal the crippling strength of McCarthy's prose, but the potential is there and it's still untapped.
He pats your kidneys while you grab your face and when you've stopped crying, he really puts you in your place.
"The fuck you think you are, pendejo? Huh? The fuck you think this is? A vacation?" Then he laughs. A cruel and practiced laugh. He's made this same speech dozens of times. It's the part of his job that he enjoys.
The imagery Ayres employs also contributes at making FIERCE BITCHES an object of such singular beauty. It's all about subtle choices that gnaw away at his characters' reality. We're not talking magical realism or anything like that, more like a David Lynch approach to nightmarish visions. Ayres always has both feet set in reality, but things can get utterly bizarre in a remote place where the rules of normal society don't apply. I'm not going to quote it, because it would be a spoiler, but the description of a character's injury towards the end of FIERCE BITCHES isn't without reminding you of Lynch's dark sonata LOST HIGHWAY.
FIERCE BITCHES is a great way for Crime Factory Books to kick off their Single Shot collection. It's a book about the horror of being human, a testament at our capacity to follow our greed and create war conditions wherever we go. If I had any criticism towards it, it's that I found it a little truncated. There isn't enough breathing room for the three protagonists, since Politoburg is such an important character in itself. Maybe if the place would've occupied an ever bigger place, it would've been even more efficient. Anyway, I enjoyed the hell out of FIERCE BITCHES and was agreeably surprised that Jedidiah Ayres showed such a different side of himself. Don't sleep on it, you'll get nightmares!
FOUR STARS
* Him and his friend you may or may not recognize from Ayres' earlier work.