CB McKenzie

I disliked this book for all the reasons that others who disliked it have detailed. There is a big difference between trying to write like James Lee Burke or Cormac McCarthy, and being those two authors, to name but two.
This book hit all of the requirements to be a critics darling.
1. Author has a gritty blue collar background.
2. Author got an MFA
3. Author is overly descriptive regarding people, places, things that don't require that much detail. ( do I really need to know the name of every concert ticket the deceased has in his room.
4. Use words to demonstrate how vast your vocabulary is thanks to your MFA.
5. Add in one or more foreign languages ( Spanish, American Indian ) for no additional benefit to the reader.
6. Be creative. In this case, don't use quotation marks ever, but still have lots of dialogue exchanges. Oh and don't have chapters.
This book is beyond pretentious to the point of being laughable, the story never goes anywhere the dog is either bionic or the fittest dog on the planet, and the main character is neither interesting nor someone the reader can empathize with.
Overall this book was for me a complete waste of time.
… (meer)

"Bad Country" is long, slow, sometimes uncomfortable journey into one man's experience of trying to live his life in the unforgiving terrain of the South West Arizona. The journey is strung across the frame of an investigation of the death of a young boy, shot and left to bleed out under a highway.

The man making the journey and carrying out the investigation is a Native American man, Rodeo Garnet, former rodeo star and now a low key, low rent Private Investigator. Accompanied only by his old dog (whose name we never learn) Rodeo chooses to live a mostly solitary life, based in a run-down house on an abandoned development in a remote location where the desert meets the mountains.

Much of the pleasure of the book comes from the way Rodeo looks at the world with quiet, careful accuracy and reacts to it with a pragmatic calm that remains determined rather than fatalistic or cynical. Mostly, Rodeo sees other people and himself for who they are. He is neither surprised nor disappointed with what he sees, it is what it is, and only some of what he sees requires him to do anything.

As Rodeo slowly and carefully compiles the information he needs to understand what happened to the boy who's death he is investigating, he constantly crosses and recrosses a trail that seems to link together the deaths of a number of Native Americans, one of whom was dumped almost at his door. Rodeo thinks about this and works it through with quiet stoicism.

"Bad Country" looks at Arizona not as an exotic location but as home. It's not a very hospitable home but it's home nonetheless. The plot is set in a stable context of people who have known and each other for so long that they have mostly come to terms with one another. There's no deep existential angst here. No "ain't it awful that my life is so hard". Instead the, main impression I was left with was a very non-Anglo spirit of endurance.

This is CB McKenzie's debut novel and, despite the prizes that it won, I felt that showed through more often than I would have liked. Sometimes the descriptions tried a little too hard. Sometimes the pace was so slow that I was checking for a pulse. Yet mostly, what comes through is a unique voice and a lot of talent.

I listened to the audiobook version and was deeply impressed by the way in which Mark Bramhall's narration enriched the atmosphere of the book, both from the unhurried pace of his delivery and the accuracy of the accents he used.… (meer)