Slammer by Allan Guthrie – review

Allan Guthrie knows how to keep the pages and your stomach turning like no other author working today, but with Slammer he proves a master at wrenching your heart as well. With his fifth and finest novel, Guthrie draws you into prison guard Nick Glass’s reality by jangling the holy hell out of your nerves, keeps you going with a wicked crime plot, then wraps it all up by leaving you absolutely devastated. To say that this is for the basement crazies is putting it lightly, but to deny yourself such an intense experience would be a crime in itself. Read Slammer, dear reader, read it toot-fucking-sweet.

It’s the story of a rookie guard Nick Glass at a Scottish prison known as “the Hilton,” a maximum security house where both the prisoners and the guards seem to have it in for him from day one. I’ve read and watched lots of brutal prison shit over the years, but never before have I been so unnerved, so absolutely aware of the fact that, yes, some horrible shit could befall our hero at any time, as I was in the opening pages of this book. You’d hope that Glass could at least go home at night to a pleasant home life, but his marriage is hanging by a thread, his young daughter the only faint glimmer of sunshine.

Glass is barely a few weeks into the job when an inmate makes Glass an offer he can’t refuse: deal drugs for him or his man on the outside pays his wife a visit, rape-wise. Naturally, Glass is soon up to his neck in shit that could earn him a cell in his own workplace. And then he starts tasting the product. And then the bodies start piling up. And then, well, the Nerd isn’t one for fucking spoilers, no sir.

I should mention that this is also arguably Guthrie’s most ambitious book, as well. Where his other novels usually just stretch over a few days, Slammer has a much longer timeline, the story carrying on for months, eventually years, even. Also Guthrie also has some sly literary tricks up his sleeves this time out, but not to worry:  he’s not out to impress or get cloyingly “meta” on your ass or some shit like that. I mean, this is Allan Guthrie for fuck’s sake, a master of clear-eyed prose.

But while it’s undeniably ambitious, the plot isn’t the crazy Blood Simple-esque multi-character suspense vehicle he delivered with Savage Night and Hard Man. In Slammer we’re riding with Glass all the way every day, yet shit is still just as complex and twisty as those previous two efforts. And Glass, it should be said, is no doubt a major part of that aforementioned emotional aspect of the novel. He’s probably Guthrie’s most sympathetic protagonist to date, a victim and sad-fucking-sack even…until the point he decides not to be a victim, wherein, you know, the horrible noir shit starts happening to him. You love and ache for the man, even when he does the unspeakable.

But you’ll excuse the Nerd, dear readers, as he’s clearly lost the plot here. The artistic merits and ambition and cry-making and all that hoity-toity shit wouldn’t mean fuck, if this shit didn’t absolutely rip in the suspense, violence, and nasty departments, and there’s no fucking denying that such thrills abound in Slammer. But if you were even marginally aware of the man’s work, you knew that shit already. You basement crazy jollies will be thoroughly fucking sated by the end of Slammer, no doubt about it. Thing is, you might need to keep the tissues near-at-hand, as well.