Book Review : David Simmons - Ghosts of East Baltimore (2022)
Crime novels are a dime a dozen. They are quite often plot driven, involve murder or drugs in one way or another and end whenever the bad guy's either dead or in jail. I burned out on them six or seven years ago, so I choose my battles now. I would've never chosen to review David Simmons' Baltimore novels if he didn't offer to send them to me, but I'm glad that he did. Ghosts of East Baltimore is not just a novel about gang and drugs. In fact, it barely is about that. It's about poverty, systemic dysfunction and much more.
Ghosts of East Baltimore tells the story of Worm, a young man who walks out of two years in the slammer and back into a city that's same, but different. Without a dime or an option for the future, Worm visits an old business acquaintance named Sweet Breath in order to make a quick score. The carnivorous Baltimore quite literally sinks its teeth into the poor guy and pulls him into a mythical battle between forces that are tearing the city apart. Because who will save Baltimore if its everyman can't?
The Art of Writing About Poverty
A lot of popular fiction in this day and age deals with what I call poverty porn. In the U.S, it often means fiction romanticizing working class Irish neighborhoods where family, loyal and crime coexist in precarious balance. I love Dennis Lehane as much as the next guy, but he's guilty of this. But this is not how real poverty and dispossession work. But I could tell David Simmons knows a thing or two about growing up rough from reading Ghosts of East Baltimore and it was my favorite thing about it.
Simmons does it quite gracefully. It’s always with a sentence or two that he anchors the life philosophy of someone who has nothing. When Worm gets out of prison, he makes an inventory of what he possesses. These are mostly clothing apparel: a t-shirt, jeans, a Ferragamo leather belt, but Worm says: "at least I have that". You've never been poor if you don't understand the beauty in that: having nothing and being thankful for it. That you could barter literally next to nothing into a couple days of survival.
There's another great scene near the beginning of the novel where Worm buys drugs, but he doesn't know why he does. It's such a simple, but heartbreaking detail. Worm falls back into his old automatisms and settles into his old neighborhood without anything having changed even if he'd been inside and mostly clean for two years. You have to live outside of your own head to experience this kind of inertia. Where the comfort of being where you belong overthrows any self-preserving instincts you might have.
The (Mythological) Battle for Baltimore
The other great idea David Simmons had with Ghosts of East Baltimore is to mythologize real issues Baltimore is facing. I mean, there are drugs and systemic racism in the book, but these issues are also embodied by characters that feel straight out of a David Lynch film. There's Sweet Breath, an overweight, footless drug dealers who represent self-defeating cycles that drag common folks down; the mysterious antiochans that represent gentrification; the Greeks who stand-in for criminality of various sorts, etc.
…and there’s Worm, a normal guy for Baltimore's standard (which implies criminality for survival purposes) who's metaphorically and literally fighting for his life in the middle of it. Worm’s relatability is really key in existential puzzle of a novel. He doesn't have much plans for the future outside of making it through the day and the forces tearing Baltimore apart have no desire to let him be safe and start anew. His very literal battle echoes the existential battle raging within all of us, which makes this novel quite readable.
*
I liked Ghosts of East Baltimore a lot better than I thought I would. At the end of the day it’s a surreal crime novel, but it’s an aggressively intelligent and original one. It's like The Wire meets Atlanta. It’s weird, it’s gritty although it doesn't really care about being so, it has a heart. David Simmons is a low-key cerebral writer who’s completely devoid of ego and who writes from a very pure place. I believe this is a first novel, but I'm looking forward to more ambitious projects because this is already pretty good.
