Order GETTING UGLY here
(also reviewed)
Order REMO WENT ROGUE here
When Harry Potter and the Twilight saga hit the silver screen, the shockwave of success could be felt throughout the publishing industry. Film audiences flocked into bookstores and Young Adult fiction became the hot thing to write. Before that, the success of Stephen King's movie adaptations in the eighties had the same galvanizing effect on the career of horror writers. Following the monster success of television shows like Breaking Bad and Justified, I was expecting a new dawn for crime writers, but it never quite happened. This question popped again during my reading of Mike McCrary's debut novella GETTING UGLY and I believe to have found a couple answers my existential questions.
Leon used to be a hot shot FBI agent. He was tasked of finding and bringing to justice a prominent figure of the underworld named Big Ugly and he did, just to be abandoned by justice at the gates of hell and left to suffer Big Ugly's cruel fantasies. A couple years later, Leon is a shell of his former self, working as a security guard and he is offered the opportunity of a lifetime by a former employer : there has been a rare Big Ugly sighting in the wilderness and a psychopath hit squad is forming to go after him. Leon's not a psychopath himself, but he wants back what's been taken away from him more than anything in the world.
Leon gets lost in her gaze as he explains, "It's about taking back what was taken from me. Finding something positive in all this bad. I lost everything to that man, a life and a woman I loved more than anything. I can never get it all back; I've been reduced to next to nothing. So now, I guess, it's all about just getting back to good."
Pike and Patience actually look moved by his honesty.
Patience takes Leon's face in her hands. "That's the best reason I've heard yet. I'm sorry you've been hurt, you gorgeous man." She gently caressed his cheek with the tips of her fingers then whispers. ''But you're a complete pussy.''
No one writes action scenes quite like Mike McCrary. One thing people don't seem to understand is that they are insanely hard to write and that most of them are crippling failures. It's a popular misconception that the sensory satisfaction of watching a breathless action scene in cinema translates well to literature, but McCrary makes it work because he creates strong images instead of a series of events. GETTING UGLY is a little bit too crowded for its diminutive size (139 pages), it's tough to latch on to a character since it's switching point of view so much, but the action scenes are as golden as they are in REMO WENT ROGUE because Mike McCrary knows how to write them.
Action scenes are not the only calling card of GETTING UGLY. It challenges the cliché portrayal of FBI agents in mainstream film and literature too. The FBI agents of Mike McCrary are not corporate shit disturbers who sabotage the work of local police and they're not noble monster hunters either. They're a bunch of snakes stabbing each other in the back for career advancement. It's rare to watch/read something about the FBI with fresh ideas. The books of Mike McCrary are the closest thing I know from a killer series or a wicked gangster movies and yet, you probably don't know who he is.
Why is that so? I think that unlike for YA and horror, the person who enjoys watching crime fiction simply doesn't read anymore, so the challenge lies not in writing something that sells but in bringing books back to this audience. Although I thought GETTING UGLY was inferior to REMO WENT ROGUE *, Mike McCrary's talent is undeniable. No one writes quite like him. He's not the most subtle, but he's packing a knockout blow you can feel through the gloves.
* Remo's a more mature, better developed product.
* Remo's a more mature, better developed product.
