If I were a shittier writer (I can already hear the peanut gallery mumbling “How much shittier could you possibly get…”), I’d write something fantastically lame like “Tower is a towering achievement by two writers who already stand tall than the noir genre,” or something equally that awesome. Maybe something like “Double your pleasure with Reed Farrel Coleman and Ken Bruen’s Tower.” I could keep going, but I won’t. It’s dangerous to let the Gene Shalit side of your brain run wild. Bad shit spews forth.
But back to the point, Tower is the type of book I’ve been waiting on Bruen to put out for a while now. I’m not as familiar with Coleman, seeing how, you know, I haven’t read any of his other shit yet, but that will happen soon as I cut this fucking TBR pile down to size. Also, when you’re an obsessive nerd like yours truly, you start from the beginning and work your way to the present, and dude’s got a fair-sized bibliography, to be fucking sure. But enough of the rationalizing and blow-jobbing, let me give you a heads up on what this beast is fucking well about.
Tower tells of Nick and Todd, two best friends and fellow thugs-on-the-rise in the New York Irish mob. When word gets out that there’s a rat in the gang, friendship is tested and bad shit fucking well happens.
Okay, I hear you, dear reader: that is a fucking vague as all hell description, right? Well, in fairness, this is a pretty short read, and I’m not about to spoil shit for you. I don’t do spoilers. Who do you think I am, Roger Ebert (Jesus, what’s with the fucking film critic references today? Fingers crossed that I can mention one more later)?
What makes the book stand out is its structure. The first half of Tower is told by Nick, while the second is related by Todd. Only instead of Todd picking up where Nick left off, he goes back over the previous events to give the reader a whole other take on what has just happened (think of the movie Rashomon only without Mifune, feudal Japan and subtitles).
Besides making the book kick ass, the reason for this structure is because (and I’m getting all inside baseball on you here because I went to a fan-fucking-tastic reading by Coleman hosted by Minneapolis’ Once Upon a Crime Bookstore) apparently Bruen wrote the Nick (who is Irish-American) half and then Coleman wrote the Todd (who is Jewish/Irish-American) half based on Bruen’s original piece. You’d think such a definitive form of collaboration would be jarring, but it actually works in the book’s favor. They are two distinctly different characters, so shit-yeah they have a different voice style.
I’ve taken issue with all of Bruen’s solo works since American Skin (possibly my favorite novel of the decade), tiring of the same psycho killers fucking with the same characters time and time again. But his collaboration shit has been top-fucking-notch. Bruen’s Max and Angela novels that he co-wrote with Jason Starr are fucking noir manna from hell, and Tower is even more successful than any of those black fucking gems.
In other words, get your fucking mitts on a copy Tower toot-fucking-sweet. Well, only do so if you think Michael Medved is a family values nutcase (There, I knew I could bring this shit full fucking circle).
