The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston

From the Publisher

With a style that is razor sharp, an eye that never shies from the gritty details, and a taste for stories that simultaneously shock, disturb, and entertain, Charlie Huston is one of a kind. And The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death is the type of story–swift, twisted, hilarious, somehow hopeful–that only he could dream up.

The fact is, whether it’s a dog hit by a train or an old lady who had a heart attack on the can, someone has to clean up the nasty mess. And that someone is Webster Fillmore Goodhue, who just may be the least likely person in Los Angeles County to hold down such a gig. With his teaching career derailed by tragedy, Web hasn’t done much for the last year except some heavy slacking. But when his only friend in the world lets him know that his freeloading days are over, and he tires of taking cash from his spaced-out mom and refuses to take any more from his embittered father, Web joins Clean Team–and soon finds himself sponging a Malibu suicide’s brains from a bathroom mirror, and flirting with the man’s bereaved and beautiful daughter.

Then things get weird: The dead man’s daughter asks a favor. Her brother’s in need of somebody who can clean up a mess. Every cell in Web’s brain tells him to turn her down, but something else makes him hit the Harbor Freeway at midnight to help her however he can. Is it her laugh? Her desperate tone of voice? The chance that this might be history’s strangest booty call? Whatever it is, soon enough it’s Web who needs the help when gun-toting California cowboys start showing up on his doorstep. What’sthe deal? Is it something to do with what he cleaned up in that motel room in Carson? Or is it all about the brewing war between rival trauma cleaners? Web doesn’t have a clue, but he’ll need to get one if he’s going to keep from getting his face kicked in. Again. And again. And again.

Full of black humor, stunning violence, singular characters, and neon dialogue, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death is classic Charlie Huston: a wild ride that’ll leave you breathless and shaken, grinning and begging for more.

The Washington Post - Patrick Anderson

Charlie Huston has for several years been one of the best-kept secrets in American fiction; this novel might move him into the mainstream. If you believe that the world is mad—a position that with each passing day becomes easier to accept—The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death will provide welcome support for your view. The novel had me laughing out loud many times, but of course, like all the best comic fiction (Catch-22 and Portnoy's Complaint come to mind), at bottom it is deadly serious. Life is violent, messy and all too short, and laughter is the best revenge.

The New York Times Book Review - Marilyn Stasio

Huston isn't as noir as he probably wants to be. Web has a sentimental streak that would shame Dickens, and the miseries he's had to bear are absurdly overstated. But the outlandish characters—from Web's trippy parents to the noble soul who trusts him with a job—are brazen originals, and the dialogue is the roar of a death-defying talent.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death is [Huston's] almost entirely successful leap into crime fiction's mainstream. Despite frequent and literally splashy touches of the grotesque, it takes a tart, quick-witted, sharply funny trip, hijacked only by certain conventional plot touches and brushes with sentimentality. The vivid hilarity of Mr. Huston's hippies manque and stumblebum, Hollywood-obsessed tough guys is this book's hallmark.

Publishers Weekly

Huston's darkly comic slice of Southern California noir is filled with distinctive characters that leap from the page and, thanks to Paul Michael Garcia's remarkable versatility, speak in equally arresting voices. Chief among them is Web Goodhue, the novel's narrator, a slacker forced by circumstance into temp work with a crew that mops up messy postmortem residue. Just as Huston makes the outwardly obnoxious and brutally snarky protagonist sympathetic, Garcia layers self-doubt, sensitivity and intelligence beneath the arrogance and an overriding humanity that Web attempts to mask with his misanthropic (often very funny) remarks. The other characters are equally well matched vocally: Web's father speaks with the boozy rasp of a self-loathing alcoholic; Po Sin, the massive boss of the Clean Team, has a deep and rumbling delivery; and femme fatale Solidad tries to hide her naïveté behind hard-boiled banter. Throw in a gallery of motor mouth crazies, flat-voiced killers and Web's amazingly tolerant best friend Chev, and you have a thrilling and smartly enacted audio package. A Ballantine hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 10). (Jan.)

Roland Person - Library Journal

This isn't a typical mystery-readers don't encounter a murder until p. 192-and the protagonist isn't a typical investigator, but then Huston's previous works featuring a vampire PI (Joe Pitt Casebooks series) and a slacker hit man (Hank Thompson) are also atypical. In Huston's second stand-alone work (after Shotgun Rule), Web Goodhue, a thirtyish Hollywood elementary school teacher traumatized by the violent death of a student, quits his job and retreats into an emotional shell. Helping an acquaintance clean up crime scenes gets Web involved with a young woman whose father died in a very messy suicide. She and her maniacal brother entangle Web in stolen almonds, human smuggling, murderous criminals, and her own kidnapping. Huston tells a wild and fanciful tale with gritty and witty skill, although the graphic language may be too strong for some patrons. For most public libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

A troubled young man tries to redeem his life. Web Goodhue is running out of fans. His best friend Chev, who's fed and housed him uncomplainingly, finally gives him an ultimatum: Shape up or get lost. Perhaps it's the shock of an endangered friendship that catapults Web toward epiphany. He begins to understand that trauma, however real and painful, can't forever excuse parasitic behavior. So he gets a job, and an unlikely job it is. Webster Goodhue, former dedicated high-school teacher, is now a crime-scene cleaner-upper. As the newest member of Team Clean, his role is to scrub away the messy and invariably gore-drenched aftermath of violent death. Oddly enough, he finds the work satisfying-an encouraging sign that he's on his way to becoming "a kind of a grown-up." True, he encounters unimagined downsides, from severe beatings administered by rancorous rivals (crime-scene cleaning, it turns out, is a growth industry that's fiercely competitive) to a near-death experience at the hands of some no-goods convinced he stands between them and a cherished get-rich scam. As for the upsides, there's the lovely, sexy Soledad, who may have an unexpected downside as well. Violent and uncomfortably graphic at times, but the dialogue is sharp and funny, and Huston (The Shotgun Rule, 2007, etc.), as always, does it his way.

Product Details

• ISBN: 034550111X
  
• ISBN-13: 9780345501110
• Format: Hardcover, 319pp
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Pub. Date: January 2009
• Sales Rank: 5,715

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I’m not sure where one should expect to find the bereaved daughter of a wealthy Malibu suicide in need of a trauma cleaner long after midnight, but safe to say a trucker motel down the 405 industrial corridor in Carson was not on my list of likely locales.

—Ouch. That looks painful.

I touched the bandage on my forehead.

—And if that’s what it feels like to look at it, imagine how it feels to actually have it happen to you.

The half of her face that I could see in the chained gap at the edge of the door nodded.

—Yeah, I’d imagine that sucks.

Cars whipped past on the highway across the parking lot, taking full advantage of the few hours in any given Los Angeles county twenty-four hour period when you might get the needle on the high side of sixty. I watched a couple of them attempting to set a new land speed record. I looked back at Soledad’s face, bisected by the door.

—So?

—Uh huh?

I hefted the plastic carrier full of cleaning supplies I’d brought from the van.

—Someone called for maid service?

—Yeah. That was me.

—I know.

She fingered the slack in the door chain, set it swinging back and forth.

—I didn’t really think you’d come.

—Well, I like to surprise.

She stopped playing with the chain.

—Terrible habit. Don’t you know most people don’t like surprises?

I looked over at the highway and watched a couple more cars.

—Can I ask a silly question?

—Sure.

I looked back at her.

—What the fuck am Idoing here?

She ran a hand through her hair, let it fall back over her forehead.

—You sure you want to do this, Web?

That being the kind of question that tips most people off to a fucked up situation, I could very easily have taken it as my cue to go downstairs, get back in the van and get the hell gone. But it’s not like I hadn’t already been clued to things being fucked up when she called in the middle of the night and asked me to come to a motel to clean a room. And there I was anyway. So who was I fooling?

Exactly no one.

—Just let me in and show me the problem.

—Think you can fix it, do you?

I shook my head.

—No, probably not. But it’s cold out here. And I came all this way. She showed me half her smile, the other half hidden behind the door.

—And you’re still clinging to some hope that a girl asking you to come clean something is some kind of booty call code, right?

I rubbed the top of my head. But I didn’t say anything. Not feeling like saying no and lying to her so early in our relationship. There would be time for that kind of thing later. There’s always time for lying.

She inhaled, let it out slow.

—OK.

The door closed. I heard the chain unhook. The door opened and I walked in, my feet crunching on something hard.

—This the asshole?

I looked at the young dude standing at the bathroom door with a meticulously crafted fauxhawk. I looked at bleached teeth and handcrafted tan. I looked at the bloodstains on his designer-distressed jeans and his artfully faded reproduction Rolling Stones concert T from a show that took place well before he was conceived. Then I looked at much larger bloodstains on the sheets of the queen-size bed and the flecks of blood spattered on the wall. I looked at the floor to see what I’d crushed underfoot, half expecting cockroaches, and found dozens of scattered almonds instead. I listened as the door closed behind me and locked. I watched as Soledad walked toward the bathroom and the dude snagged her by the hand before she could go in.

—I asked, Is this the asshole.

I pointed at myself.

—Honestly, in most circumstances, in any given room on any given day, I’d say, Yeah, I’m the asshole here. But in this particular scenario, and I know we just met and all, but in this room here?

I pointed at him.

—I’m more than willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and say that you’re the asshole.

He looked at Soledad.

—So, yeah, he’s the asshole then?

She twisted her hand free and went into the bathroom.

—He’s the guy I told you about.

She closed the door behind her.

He looked at me.

—Yeah, you’re the asshole alright.

I held up a hand.

—Hey, look, if you’re gonna insist, I can only accept the title. But seriously, don’t sell yourself short. You got the asshole thing locked up if you want it. He came down the room in a loose strut I imagine had been meticulously
assembled from endless repeat viewings of Tom Cruise’s greatest hits.

—Yeah, I can tell by the way you’re talking. You’re the one fucked with her today. Made jokes about her dad killing himself. You’re the asshole alright. The toilet flushed, Soledad yelled over it.

—He didn’t make jokes!

The dude looked at the closed door.

—You said he made jokes.

He looked at me.

—Asshole. Fucking go in someone’s home, there’s been a tragedy, go in and try to make money off that. Fucking vulture. Fucking ghoul. Who does that, who comes up with that for a job? That your dream job, man? Cleaning up dead people? Other kids were hoping to grow up to be movie stars and you were having fantasies about scooping people’s guts off the floor?

I shifted, crushing a few more almonds.

—Truth is, mostly I had fantasies about doing your mom.

He slipped a lozenge of perforated steel from his back pocket, flicked his wrist and thumb in an elaborate show of coordination, and displayed the open butterfly knife resting on his palm.

—Say what, asshole?

Say nothing, actually. Except say that maybe he was right and I was the asshole in the room. Certainly being an asshole was how I came to be there in the first place.

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