Christine Runyon Reviews Man Alone: The Dark Book by Jack Remick
Man Alone: the dark book
Fiction by jack remick
reviewed by christine runyon
In Man Alone: The Dark Book, Jack Remick, Seattle’s treasure emeritus, invented a new genre—pulp literature, in this latest of his twenty-two books. He delivers lines with the deadpan understatement of Raymond Chandler. He lays down fresh images, without a trace of hackney. This is a book anyone can read because, to its virtue, it doesn’t stink of high literature. In this story, as in life, the questions come easier than the answers. Foremost, I find myself wondering about the transactional nature of relationships. What happens to people who can’t meet the price that a high-rise city requires of them? When is the cost of a relationship, whether with alcohol or with a dangerous woman, too high to bear? Remick has come into a new super power in Man Alone.
This is a book anyone can read because, to its virtue, it doesn’t stink of high literature. In this story, as in life, the questions come easier than the answers.
This is a tale about dangerous people, but this is not merely a morality or cautionary story. This is the underbelly. This book provides the safe distance from which we can regard our own disappointments and impulses, the price one pays to get an approximation of one’s needs met. This 120 page, dynamic tale finds Zene, our anti-hero protagonist, tanked in a corner bar with all the ambiance of desperation. Zene, is a man who has lived by his fists, not in some noble boxer’s ring, but in the hard places where anger erupts and true enforcement comes from the sort of prisoner law that says, we take care of our own offenders. He is a man whose only asset left after a life of hard drinking is his “drivers license with a chauffeur’s endorsement.” Remick draws the drunk so precisely that I must ask—is Remick one? Zene’s a man for whom pity would be wasted. Zene’s only relationship is to alcohol. Drunkenness keeps him from remembering, “the last time he got involved,” because, “it took a lot of effort that otherwise could have been expended in walking straight.”
We have the femme fatale, Karizma, of whom Zene says, “a hundred other women in twenty cities had failed to kill that ache.” Zene and Karizma meet again after fifteen years in a sort of terrible lottery in the corner store where lotto tickets are sold to the people without hope, a store in which tanked and stoned people entered, and, not remembering why they were there, “left with a quart of milk.” Remick paints this store with the smell of expiration. Zene is the alcoholic store clerk, so without resources, he is probably only a week or two from homelessness.
Filling out this cast of characters is a brutally-efficient Seattle, in the tradition of Black Mask. The plot is advanced by a city built up by wealth that consumes its denizens of lesser fortune. As Zene, street poet extraordinaire, reflects, “the city that had cut him into pieces and chewed his mind, his bone, his future—lay spread out silent and beautiful and poisonous, and deep in the concrete canyons, the kitchens of hate boiled men and women, turned them into jelly, served them up in glops on marble tables where tycoons born naked ate the underlings with a silver fork.”
Remick serves up a transactional dentist, Alfred, more twisted than the dentist in Little Shop of Horrors. But it is Karizma who will have the last word in this book packed with the violence of passion. It is Karizma who commits her own honor killing, though she would no doubt have had a final laugh at the man who thought he could purchase her, as well as the man who thought he could redeem her with an honor killing.
In the final scenes, we are to consider the houseboats, the suicide lights on the George Washington Memorial Bridge (aka the Aurora Bridge), and the darkest of all transactions Seattle will require—the black maw of a train tunnel.
Ms. Runyon is a poet on an island in the Salish Sea. She lives with her beekeeper.
Man Alone: The Dark Book
Fiction by Jack Remick
Sidekick Press
2950 Newmarket Street, Suite 101-329
Bellingham, WA 98226
https://www.sidekickpress.com/product/man-alone-the-dark-book/
ISBN: 978-1-958808-15-3
2023, 120 pages, paperback, $16.95