Order THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY! here
(also reviewed)
Order THE SUBTLE ART OF BRUTALITY here
Order TWO BULLETS SOLVE EVERYTHING here
"Before you speak, just know I already have all the answers.''
Ryan Sayles and I have been friends for about three or four years, now. So you'll have to take this review for what it's worth because it might not be up to the objectivity standards of some of you. Ryan's prose was the very reason we started talking to one another though. I thought his debut novel THE SUBTLE ART OF BRUTALITY was so fucking great, I had to meet the guy who wrote it. This kind of thinking usually is recipe for disaster, as authors' personalities rarely live up to their work, but this time it wasn't. Ryan also happens to be one of he best people I've ever met. I've read THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY! because I'm a Ryan Sayles completist and I like to believe I would be one even if I didn't know him and this is where you should start if you don't. Because if you want to know what makes an author special, you gotta check out the things he does that everybody else is doing too: short stories!
I wouldn't advocate reading any short story collection that wasn't written with a single, clear purpose in mind. In most cases, it's vanity publishing for authors who wouldn't cut it otherwise. This is obviously not the case here. There are many things that stand out about THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY! and that make it better than half the novels I read every year. First of all, you have to know that there are three Richard Dean Buckner short stories in the collection. Buckner is the protagonist of THE SUBTLE ART OF BRUTALITY and probably the most interesting private detective written since the first run of Patrick Kenzie and I'm not sure Kenzie would survive a confrontation with the man they call RDB. Not even with Bubba at his side. I had a favorite RDB story because I'm a picky bitch, but they all have this trademark dynamo of a first person narration that makes the character so special.
"One of you motherfuckers knows who and where this Thomas kid is and I'll give the entire bar to the count of five before I start staking people to the wall for not answering."
Another thing you need to know about Ryan Sayles' writing, which you'll be able to appreciate in THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY!, is his peculiar way of dealing with cliché. Sayles doesn't avoid them as much as he confronts them. He'll deliberately set up a cliché situation that'll have unwitting readers roll their eyes, only to destroy it pages later. THE ROACH MOTEL REPUTATION, for example, keeps you guessing the reason why Richard Dean Buckner is turning an interrogation in a seedy bar into a public scenes and I can guarantee you that your guess is going to be wrong, and that you'll be happy that it is. My favorite cliché buster though was a kidnapping story called PUSH PUSH PUSH, where the protagonist can't quite figure the reason of his predicament. It actually requires some thinking outside the box to solve the mystery, just like when you have to figure out a riddle. It achieves an almost perfect balance between cerebral and visceral storytelling.
There's the prose, too. A lean, clever, Palahniuk-esque, friendship starting prose that is so much fun to read. A prose with a strong identity that's both easy to read, loaded with emotion and easy to break down isn't something all that common to find. In fact, it's pretty rare. I can't twist your arm into picking up a Ryan Sayles book, some of you might think that this review lacks credibility because Ryan and I are friends, but I really don't care. Authors like him are few and far between in the contemporary literature landscape and skipping him would be entirely your loss. I don't usually advocate short story collections, but THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY! is not your usual book. It's a great, cheap way of getting introduced to the warped worlds of Ryan Sayles. All you have to do is to buy it and open it up. The rest will take care of itself.
