Robbers

Rating:
Summary: Robbers
Review: "Robbers" is an astonishing debut novel. Cook is as easy with his craft and characters as if he had been at this for years. The East Texas honky-tonk, just-getting-by-but-not-quite, the On the Road ambiance is the warp and weave of this book.

Ex-cons Eddie and Ray Bob, "runnin' buddies," stop at a convenience store for cigarettes. Eddie is a penny short of the price, and the stuffy clerk is adamant, and Eddie shoots him. It is hard to tell who is more amazed, Eddie or the victim. Eddie carefully lays down four one dollar bills and goes back to the car whereupon Ray Bob rushes back, cleans out the till (and retrieves Eddie's four dollars) grabs snacks, cartons of cigarettes and sandwiches. When he ambles back to the ragtop Caddie (stolen?), he announces, "You can't steal from a dead man." Their odyssey has begun, a rampage of raiding convenience stores and leaving dead clerks. They are shot with luck, as there never are any witnesses and things go well until they pick up Della, who has had a spot of trouble of her own.

Ray Bob is vicious, highly intelligent psychopath who is jealous of Della coming between him and his runnin' buddy. Eddie, a sweet dim bulb with the soul of an artist, is clearly over his head with the murderous Ray Bob and infatuated with Della. Della, an almost "babe" (her eyes are too close together) is a combination of low down schemer and "what's a nice girl like me doing with thugs like you."

You get to know these three like members of your family (though you wouldn't want to admit you knew them.) There is a Texas Ranger grimly trying to trail him, and victim's husband who is a religious zealot and a gun nut who is following the ranger, but Ray Bob, Eddie and Della are blissfully unaware. Texas wraps around you like a sandy scarf. You think this is going to end up like the gunfight at OK Corral, but Mr. Cook has many surprises in store before you reach that last page. When you close the book, you will think long and hard about justice, in the abstract and in the particular.

"Robbers" is wonderfully written, and I would choose it as my second favorite book of 2003 (after "Life of Pi"). There have been many comparisons made from Faulkner to James Lee Burke, but I'd have to say Mr. Cook has his own unique voice, and a very good one it is.
-sweetmolly-Amazon Reviewer

Rating:
Summary: Lone Star Noir
Review: "Robbers" is an astonishing debut novel. Cook is as easy with his craft and characters as if he had been at this for years. The East Texas honky-tonk, just-getting-by-but-not-quite, the On the Road ambiance is the warp and weave of this book.

Ex-cons Eddie and Ray Bob, "runnin' buddies," stop at a convenience store for cigarettes. Eddie is a penny short of the price, and the stuffy clerk is adamant, and Eddie shoots him. It is hard to tell who is more amazed, Eddie or the victim. Eddie carefully lays down four one dollar bills and goes back to the car whereupon Ray Bob rushes back, cleans out the till (and retrieves Eddie's four dollars) grabs snacks, cartons of cigarettes and sandwiches. When he ambles back to the ragtop Caddie (stolen?), he announces, "You can't steal from a dead man." Their odyssey has begun, a rampage of raiding convenience stores and leaving dead clerks. They are shot with luck, as there never are any witnesses and things go well until they pick up Della, who has had a spot of trouble of her own.

Ray Bob is vicious, highly intelligent psychopath who is jealous of Della coming between him and his runnin' buddy. Eddie, a sweet dim bulb with the soul of an artist, is clearly over his head with the murderous Ray Bob and infatuated with Della. Della, an almost "babe" (her eyes are too close together) is a combination of low down schemer and "what's a nice girl like me doing with thugs like you."

You get to know these three like members of your family (though you wouldn't want to admit you knew them.) There is a Texas Ranger grimly trying to trail him, and victim's husband who is a religious zealot and a gun nut who is following the ranger, but Ray Bob, Eddie and Della are blissfully unaware. Texas wraps around you like a sandy scarf. You think this is going to end up like the gunfight at OK Corral, but Mr. Cook has many surprises in store before you reach that last page. When you close the book, you will think long and hard about justice, in the abstract and in the particular.

"Robbers" is wonderfully written, and I would choose it as my second favorite book of 2003 (after "Life of Pi"). There have been many comparisons made from Faulkner to James Lee Burke, but I'd have to say Mr. Cook has his own unique voice, and a very good one it is.
-sweetmolly-Amazon Reviewer

Rating:
Summary: A Surprising Book, in Many Ways
Review: "Robbers" is an usual first black-comic novel with pretensions toward - well, I don't know what exactly, yet, inexplicably, seems to accomplish all it sets out to do. This book is both disturbing and funny; it is the tale of Eddy and Ray Bob, two bandits who traverse Texas robbing and killing, exchanging ignorant views upon the world, and generally behaving in reprehensible, if strangely entertaining, ways. They are joined about a quarter of the way through by Della, an equally ignorant though far less cold blooded (though certainly callous in her own way) hairdresser who hooks up with Eddy. Meanwhile, the robbers are being tracked by Rule, a slightly less ignorant though far less cold-blooded (though certainly callus in his own way) Texas Ranger, who wants to bring the robbers to justice.

All of these characters confront their own dark pasts and hidden secrets, and they do so in ways that are often hilarious and creepy. There sheer callousness to death that the characters demonstrate is in some ways addictive, and it becomes surprisingly easy to sympathize with these psychos, at least Eddy, who seems less malevolent than his buddy, even though he has committed the crime that begins their running from the law.

At times these overwhelming ignorance of these characters becomes a bit too much; it ceases to be funny and seems a little more like a tired gag. I was reminded of the absurdly clueless southerners of Harry Crews's writing, but Crews plants his characters in a kind of rural circus far removed from reality, whereas Cook seems to want to keep elements of gritty realism.

The other element worth pointing out is Cook's surprising style. He writes the novel in fragmentary sentences and forgoes the cumbersome burden of quotation marks, a la Cormac McCarthy, but not with the same discipline as McCarthy: Reviewer thinking. Not as effective as McCarthy. Remembering. Put to better effect. Saying, Still interesting anyhow.

If you think you can't put up with an entire novel in that format, you may be surprised. I have a low threshold for literary pretensions that aren't rooted in some genuine intellectual project, but I found myself increasingly less irritated by Cook's style, and more and more captivated by his surprisingly effective use of this clunky device. I found the novel compulsively readable, not because I needed to know what happened next - frankly, I almost never cared what happened next - but because each scene was drawn with engaging clarity and interest. In other words, this is a book whose whole is far greater than its constituent parts, and ultimately, it is a fine whole indeed.

Rating:
Summary: A Surprising Book, in Many Ways
Review: "Robbers" is an usual first black-comic novel with pretensions toward - well, I don't know what exactly, yet, inexplicably, seems to accomplish all it sets out to do. This book is both disturbing and funny; it is the tale of Eddy and Ray Bob, two bandits who traverse Texas robbing and killing, exchanging ignorant views upon the world, and generally behaving in reprehensible, if strangely entertaining, ways. They are joined about a quarter of the way through by Della, an equally ignorant though far less cold blooded (though certainly callous in her own way) hairdresser who hooks up with Eddy. Meanwhile, the robbers are being tracked by Rule, a slightly less ignorant though far less cold-blooded (though certainly callus in his own way) Texas Ranger, who wants to bring the robbers to justice.

All of these characters confront their own dark pasts and hidden secrets, and they do so in ways that are often hilarious and creepy. There sheer callousness to death that the characters demonstrate is in some ways addictive, and it becomes surprisingly easy to sympathize with these psychos, at least Eddy, who seems less malevolent than his buddy, even though he has committed the crime that begins their running from the law.

At times these overwhelming ignorance of these characters becomes a bit too much; it ceases to be funny and seems a little more like a tired gag. I was reminded of the absurdly clueless southerners of Harry Crews's writing, but Crews plants his characters in a kind of rural circus far removed from reality, whereas Cook seems to want to keep elements of gritty realism.

The other element worth pointing out is Cook's surprising style. He writes the novel in fragmentary sentences and forgoes the cumbersome burden of quotation marks, a la Cormac McCarthy, but not with the same discipline as McCarthy: Reviewer thinking. Not as effective as McCarthy. Remembering. Put to better effect. Saying, Still interesting anyhow.

If you think you can't put up with an entire novel in that format, you may be surprised. I have a low threshold for literary pretensions that aren't rooted in some genuine intellectual project, but I found myself increasingly less irritated by Cook's style, and more and more captivated by his surprisingly effective use of this clunky device. I found the novel compulsively readable, not because I needed to know what happened next - frankly, I almost never cared what happened next - but because each scene was drawn with engaging clarity and interest. In other words, this is a book whose whole is far greater than its constituent parts, and ultimately, it is a fine whole indeed.

Rating:
Summary: Booklist Review
Review: (The following is excerpted from a starred and boxed pre-release review by Bill Ott published in BOOKLIST on October 15, 2000) --- Eddie and Ray Bob are runnin' buddies, and they run for all they're worth, through Texas and Louisiana, in this high-octane first novel. Eddie starts shooting first, but it's really sociopath Ray Bob we have to worry about ... Then there's Della, a hairdresser ... who hitches a ride in the runnin' buddies' ragtop caddy, and naturally, three's a crowd ... This may sound like a cross between "Natural Born Killers" and "Will and Grace," but, in fact, it's something very different. Cook takes the noir chase novel (there's a persistent Texas Ranger on the boys' trail) on some remarkable detours. Yes, we feel the pathos of white-trash lives gone wrong, but soon enough, we've forgotten the big picture; we're runnin', too.

Rating:
Summary: Publishers Weekly Review
Review: (The following pre-release review was published in the fiction section of PUBLISHERS WEEKLY on October 9, 2000) --- The harsh, foreboding essence of rural Texas dominates Cook's bloody, bittersweet debut novel, charting the adventures of two criminal drifters and their pursuer ... The boys' aimless adventure eventually includes Della, a woman who patterns her life on women's magazines and desperately aspires to middle-class respectability ... as crafty Texas Ranger, Rule Hooks, picks up their scent. Hooks, a tracker by training and instinct, relies on modern police methods as well as his gut instincts to sniff out his prey. Cook's plot tumbles from scene to scene with jarring brilliance, the pathos of his characters lending his otherwise brutal world a certain beauty. His imagery is striking, almost lyrical ... This gritty crime drama is not for the faint of heart, but Cook¹s prose sets it a notch above many like novels. The publisher compares the book to the work of James Lee Burke; if booksellers push this comparison, or if they aim the title at a hip, youthful readership, it could make out like a bandit.

Rating:
Summary: TCP Review
Review: (The following review by Reed Holland appears in the December issue of Texas Co-op Power magazine) --- Robbers falls within the genre of darkly comic, smart-talk thrillers of Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy and James Lee Burke. Cook, whose novel will soon be published in England, France and Japan, writes with evangelical rhythms and a sheer joy for words that can make his prose read like Faulkner's or Cormac McCarthy's: "Vast stretches of land to a horizon unbroken save for lonely trailer homes perched queerly in the stepped green-brown expanse, as if dropped from the sky as an alien afterthought." Cook, who lives in Austin, aspires to the literary noire. He finds it in wasteland along the Houston Ship Channel that once was a leper colony, a highway on the Bolivar Peninsula broken away by the Gulf of Mexico, and a hardwood overstory so thick in Jasper County that a deluge of rain roars on the canopy, slowly dripping through, as the action takes a hair-raising turn. Make what you will of Cook's antiheroes, violence and frank carnality, but here's a Texas writer whose eye is keen, and whose voice is sure and strong.

Rating:
Summary: Robbers
Review: Christopher Cook captures the essence of "Natural Born Killers" on the road again. Complex writing that sails through your consciousness makes this a must read for those hot, Texas nights. There are layers of subtle nuance for the well-read reader as well as good solid writing for the not so well-read person. I highly recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: Robbers
Review: Christopher Cook captures the essence of "Natural Born Killers" on the road again. Complex writing that sails through your consciousness makes this a must read for those hot, Texas nights. There are layers of subtle nuance for the well-read reader as well as good solid writing for the not so well-read person. I highly recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: Definately TEXAS NOIR
Review: Christopher Cook has written a first novel which clearly falls into the Texas Noir style. If that doesn't exist, then he invented it. It felt in some ways like a tragedy but the interest was there for me in the characters and in the locale.

There was a haunting realism which is where the Noir comes in for me. The range of life and types of people are straight out of the Lone Star State.

I had some difficulty with the plot progression but it was a powerful read.