High Life by Matthew Stokoe

In my attempt to look for a new author, I tried Matthew Stokoe’s novel High Life, which was mentioned twice in Ken Bruen’s book, The Dramatist. I’ve always liked Bruen’s many references to other authors, and this was an author that I didn’t know. With regard to Stokoe’s writing, Bruen wrote, “It was Chandler on heroin, Hammet on crack, James M. Cain with a blowtorch, and it matched my mood with a mild ferocity. The writing was a knuckleduster to the brain, a chainsaw to the gut. It not so much rocked as walloped the blood with a rush of pure amphetamine. The prose sang and screamed along every page, a cesspit of broken lives illuminated with a taste of dark euphoria. I felt downright feverish. How often is a novel like a literary blow to the system? I felt Jim Thompson would have killed for this. If James Ellroy had indeed abandoned the crime genre, then here was his dark heir.” Then, I was intrigued by a quote by Bruen from Stokoe, “Around me the world seemed to slip sideways and all the things in the room suddenly looked flat and sharply defined, like high resolution photos of themselves that were too intensely concentrated to recognize. I stood in a synaptic freeze and catalogued my idiocy.” High Life starts on the California coast in a public park in Santa Monica with a murder of a prostitute, Karen. She was married to Jack who had come to LA to make his fame and fortune as a television host, but who lost his way via his addictions and his fantasy world. The beginning of the story involved the one-year relationship of this couple and the police detective, Ryan, who thinks he can pin the murder on Jack. About 50 pages into this, I abandoned the book. While I don’t disagree with Bruen’s characterization of the writing, I could not get past two things. The first was the total coarseness, the crudity of the language. It’s not that I’m easily offended, but I usually find such vulgarity is a cover up for more clever and imaginative expression. Furthermore, the foul language was not just an occasional reference. Rather, it was nearly constant. My second problem with the book was the characters themselves. These were truly street people who were caught as they rapidly descended further down a death spiral. Perhaps the language was appropriate for the low-lifes that Stokoe was describing, but I just did not find that this book provided me with the entertaining escapism that I’m looking for.