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

It took me a full five minutes to get through the first page of this book. Huston’s dialogue is unattributed and lacks quotation marks; only an em dash tells you someone is speaking. That alone almost made me put the book down – yeah, I’m an insecure traditionalist and I hate change. But the book’s ambiguous opening sentence didn’t help either: “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”. But I pressed on, and I’m really glad I did.

In short, Charlie Huston is amazing. Well, perhaps not amazing. But this book is just about as fine as writing gets. And not in the way you might think. Huston excels at bringing his characters to life in the reader’s imagination like few other authors I’ve read – and it’s all in the dialogue. He spends very little time relating the visual details of his players. We are not told that one character has a mustache until pages after we’ve met him; not told that another is covered in rings and piercings until the closing pages of the book. In fact, by the end of the book we still have absolutely zero idea what the principal protagonist looks like, except that he is around 30. You might think that this means the book is lacking in some way – but it’s not. Raw descriptive elements are simply incidental to Huston because it’s not how he wants us to learn about his characters. He wants us to picture them through their words.

Once I got a hang of the strange dialogue, I realized this was its purpose. When someone is speaking in real life, you don’t think “Bill said” when he finishes his sentence. You know who’s speaking because you can see and hear it. It’s not separate to what you’re seeing – it is what you’re seeing. That’s where Charlie Huston’s mind is. His narrator relays description and dialogue to you as if you’re watching a movie of his life; with no conscious distinction between auditory and visual experience.

And this world is so obvious and vivid for Huston, so alive outside of the mere words necessary to relay his narrator’s experience of reality, that it’s infectious. You become immersed in it. You can’t help but see his characters with crystal clarity, each one with their own unique dramatic energy, all of it coming at you via brilliantly crafted language that ranges from authentic Hollywood intellectual elitism to tragic egotistical obstinacy.

The book so The book is so self-aware as a patently understands itself as an integrated audio-visual experience that the narrator even plays with the idea at one point, suggesting that the reader “might want to look away and not acknowledge that I did what I did.” And what is beautiful about this, apart from its irony, is that it communicates Huston’s flippancy – pique, even – towards the written word. He seems to be battling with it, trying to find ways to destroy the barrier that it creates between events and the retelling of those events. What he wants more than anything is for his readers to be able to look away, much as they would from a movie screen, with a sense that the story continues whether they are watching it or not.

But I couldn’t look away, not even for a minute.