Book Review by Hugh Blanton
Criminals, cool picaros, and frisky women inhabiting quirky locales. Dopers and dope dealers. Ramshackle barns on dilapidated farms. This is the cauldron in which Rusty Barnes has stewed his latest collection of short stories. There’s a shit ton of violence with more violence just a bad temper away. It looks like Barnes—the master of hillbilly noir and Chief of the Cornbread Cosa Nostra—has another success on his hands here. The Barnes outlaw edginess and charm we’ve come to expect from his stories is all here in this latest serpentine collection, along with casts of morally ambiguous characters.
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Half Crime is Rusty Barnes’s newest book. This collection of nine gritty short stories take place mostly in rural Pennsylvania and mostly after the natural gas fracking boom. In the story “Bad Old Boy,” Crate Lang is having trouble making ends meet in the post-fracking economic crash and appeals to his old friend Dex for a little extra work. Dex himself just works as a cable installer but “always seemed to have a finger in moneymaking schemes.” Crate doesn’t know exactly what those schemes are, but Dex puts him to work as a courier. Just make a simple delivery to Syracuse and Dex will pay him a grand. “Easy peasy,” Dex tells him. Crate shows up with the package in Syracuse, the recipient beats the shit out of Crate, takes the package and does not pay for it. Crate now knows what Dex’s moneymaking schemes are. Crate just wants to live a simple life with his wife and toddler, but now is getting pulled back into his old life as a “bad old boy.” It looks like Crate’s going to have to go back to his old ways and try to get the dope and the money back. He’s been out of the game for a while now, though.
Rusty Barnes is the editor in chief at TOUGH Crime Magazine. TOUGH gained national attention when one of its stories (“The Brothers Brujo” by Matthew Lyons) was anthologized in the 2018 Best American Short Stories series. Half Crime is Barnes’s fourth story collection. He also has four novels going back to 2014, and even has a couple collections of poetry. A fairly prolific writer, Barnes grew up in northern Appalachia where nearly all of his stories take place. Rural grit lit seems to come natural to him—we have a gospel singer in this collection named Cletus Barnhill and we get a character “who was kicking and punching like a lunatic before his cowboy boot heel stuck on a fault in the concrete floor and sent him ass over teakettle.” Barnes is Appalachia’s answer to Elmore Leonard.
Violence is Barnes’s stock-in-trade: our first story opens up with a fist fight over a dog and our second story opens up with a knife fight over a woman. That’s not to say the stories can’t be tender when they need to be. In one story a woman takes care of her brother’s mentally disabled friend—even after her brother, mother, and father pass away—just to make sure he doesn’t get dumped into some heartless institution. But the women in this collection take part in the violence too, including one who “blasted him once in the head, spreading brain matter and skull fragments all over the cooling tank.” (This was in a milking barn. Where else?) Another woman is sent out on a hit job by a sadistic dope dealer to take out a thieving underling. Just one of Barnes’s short stories has more character than any three novels you could pick at random from a national bestseller list.
Occasionally Barnes strikes one as indulgent, but he makes a damn good case for it. Compared to Barnes, some of the recent releases of crime/violence novels (The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias comes to mind) seem like they were written by mere spectators from a grandstand. Barnes’s hefty originality and realism put the reader dead center into the story ready to duck a punch or sidestep a knife slash. In each story Barnes is sawing away on his perfectly tuned fiddle, orchestrating his character’s peculiarities, alternately grinning and spitting tobacco juice out of the side of his mouth. The newer crime fiction writers entering the foray today are being given a clinic here. Sit up and pay attention.
Half Crime
by Rusty Barnes, 120 pages
Redneck Press, $16.99
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Bio: Hugh Blanton’s latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.
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