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Book Review: 'Coyote' By Colin Winnette

Andre Gray |
November 10, 2014 | 9:07 a.m. PST

Web Producer

Winnette's newest novella in the flesh--An artistic rendering. (Andre Gray)
Winnette's newest novella in the flesh--An artistic rendering. (Andre Gray)

Colin Winnette’s new psychological tragedy “Coyote” hurts. A lot. It’s the newest from Les Figues Press, a non-profit L.A. based publisher, and Winnette’s fourth book to be published. With a bleak and intense voice that comes across in an eerily undramatic fashion, the narrator gives us fragments of a story— an abusive relationship, a kidnapped daughter, a passionate detective. 

Plotwise the book has a modern noir feel to it, derived from the same stuff as works like “Prisoners” or “Gone Girl”, which use the crime thriller by mocking it, twisting it, and ultimately reshaping it to produce something ripe with intelligent commentary about the genre itself.

The NOS Contest-winning novella is sort of a “pulp” mystery; it takes all the stuff stereotypical in crime fiction and flips it on its head. The novella contains no clues, or even really any substantive talk about the case of the missing daughter. The detective, usually dead center in a mystery, is far off. Never present.

Instead, the story centers around the lull after the initial drama has resided, and the TV cameras have gone home. The internal damage and neurosis induced by not knowing, perpetuates a heartbreaking tension without climax or resolution.

While so much of the modern mystery or thriller "genre" fiction treats anticipation as a cheap commodity, Winnette gives brings back some human weight to not knowing what one wants so desperately to know.

SEE ALSO: Book Review: 'A Slip Of The Keyboard: Collected Nonfiction'

Winnette's writing has a Grimm Brother's bite. (Stacia Torborg)
Winnette's writing has a Grimm Brother's bite. (Stacia Torborg)

The unnamed narrator keeps her storytelling precise and poignant, describing only the details that are absolutely essential. Her information comes in spurts, ranging from just a paragraph to several pages.

Sometimes it feels like she’s a detective herself, dictating into a tape recorder in list speak, trying to recreate her daughter in facts, writing: “She stuck out a bee sting one time…She called herself Delilah. She buttered her toast with one finger.”

Other times the story gets intensely personal, and reads more like a diary cataloging a fall into disillusion, a self-induced psychological exam. This is especially true of blunt first sentences. “The first time I thought being a mother might have deranged me, I was watching her play in the yard," writes Winnette with heartbreaking simplicity.

SEE ALSO: Book Review: 'Tears In Rain'

This hyper-analytical, neurotic writing style can also be found in Winnette’s poetry.

In "Badly Ship," he describes a bruise on a knee, “Bigger than a Canada Goose. Bigger than a battleship. Bigger than a fire truck.”

Rattling off strange facts is how Winnette’s narrators seem to settle their nerves. The whole style screams coping mechanism, and creates troubled, scientific characters, driven mad trying to keep up with their designated societal roles. 

As you probably guessed, this is not a happy ending kind of book. It maintains through and through all the darkness you kind of expect from an author whose twitter profile picture is a headstone reading, “2 Unknown Graves.”

Even so it’s a compelling, unexpected ending, and does justice to a compelling, unexpected narrative that openly judges a heavily commercialized, often-tired genre. While the story comes through in bits and pieces, the overall book ends up reading and feeling like something comprehensive, a struggle to “keep pretending” that descends into madness.

It’s terrifying, intelligent, and will you leave you feeling uncomfortable about haircuts, barbecue, and home repair. 

This book gets 5 really black stars. 

To read more from Colin Winnette, check out his website.

Reach Web Producer Andre Gray here.


 

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