Book Review : Kelby Losack - Letting Out The Devils (2022)

May 2

May 2 Book Review : Kelby Losack - Letting Out The Devils (2022)

Literature is currently experiencing the closest thing to a punk revolution since the actual punk revolution of the late seventies. Traditional publishing is slowly going down in flames and from the ashes emerge a new breed of indie creators who write books you’ve never thought you’d read someday because no one ever thought they’d make money. Creators like Texas outlaw Kelby Losack, who’s latest bite-sized novel Letting Out The Devils might just be his realest and most haunted work to date.

Letting Out The Devils tells the story of a young gas stations attendant who’s trying to provide for his girlfriend and young daughter while also trying to exist outside of his responsibilities. Living in a rough part of Oklahoma, his opportunities are limited and the people he surrounds himself with are of questionable character. Trapped in a never ending present by his precarious financial situation, he navigates from one bad idea to the other in search for some form of happily ever after.

Dark Clerks

The easiest label you can apply on Letting Out The Devils is crime fiction, but it would also be the laziest. Although there are several crimes happening in the novel and definitely a shitload of criminals, it’s really more complicated than that. Letting Out The Devils is more akin to a dark, chaos magick version of Kevin Smith’s Clerks than anything else. It’s about people coexisting or at least trying to. It’s not as much about crimes than it is about doing what you gotta do to survive from one day to another.

One of Kelby Losack’s greatest talents as a writer is to create dreamscapes: places that don’t exist, but that feel like they do. The world of Letting Out The Devils feels like it’s floating near a highway exist, somewhere between the void and hell. It’s populated with damned souls who congregate towards the neon light, looking for money, friendship of just a fleeting moment of human contact. The narrator is either surrounded with these freaks, with his family or completely alone in a cold, decaying landscape.

Unlike the characters of Kevin Smith’s movie, the protagonist of Letting Out The Devils isn’t bound by an inner promise to give a special meaning to his life. The dices have been rolled for him already. The birth of his kid was both a blessing and a damnation which condemned him to the place he lives in and what makes him relatable is that he tries, in his own way, to make it work. He is trying his best to be decent in a world where everyone else has forgotten the very meaning of this word.

Hellscape, Oklahoma

I haven’t stressed out how great the setting of Letting Out The Devils is. It feels like the most godforsaken place you haven’t visited yet. Although it’s populated with all sorts of colourful characters, there’s an unshakable feeling of aloneness that radiates from it. The lack of upwards mobility and overbearing pull of the present give Losack’s setting a feeling of eternal damnation. There is no way out of it. Once you fall into this concrete and rot hell, the only way forward is to bury yourself deeper into it.

There is nothing quite like Letting Out The Devils in literature right now. An unflinching working class novel about the moral and literal violence of trying to survive in a world where the game is rigged against you. There’s no evil corporate overlords. The villain is the inescapable reality of working in a roadside gas station. Everybody is struggling against that toxic, alienating familiarity. That toxic inescapability. And they’re all supposed to lose sooner or later because no one escapes from hell.

I really enjoyed Letting Out The Devils. It’s a novel with a lot of empathy for those who were born crooked and the creatures that inhabit godforsaken landscapes. It isn’t trying to please everybody. It’s rugged, angry and beautiful in its own way. Because there is beauty in places human beings stopped caring for. In the abandonment and the struggle between man and nature. Letting Out The Devils understands and celebrates this beauty for it is a triumph of the human soul.