You are here: home > mystery
Shella
You always hurt the one you love
The main character in Andrew Vachss’s novel Shella has no name other than the names others know him as—Ghost, John, and the various aliases he adopts as he goes through life doing his business. His business? Killing and he is very proficient at it.
However to say that Shella is a book about a professional killer would miss the entire point of this well crafted novel. It is a quest that follows Ghost —the name that I see him as throughout the book—as he traverses the underworld of this country in search of Shella, the one woman that he has ever "loved" for lack of a better word.
It is hard to associate such a tender, romantic word with this man since from his earliest recollection he has been physically abused beyond any average person’s conception of abuse. His life is a string of juvenile detention centers that rival the most notorious prisons of today for inmate-on-inmate violence.
When Ghost meets Shella, he finds a kindred spirit, another severely damaged being for whom he develops a deep emotional attachment until they are separated when a "badger" operation goes badly wrong. Shella entices a mark into a motel room with the promise of sex and Ghost comes in as the jealous husband. The mark pays up to save the beating or worse that would otherwise result. Only this time, the mark is a serial killer who Ghost is forced to kill to save Shella. Ghost tells Shella to scram so he can clean up and then the cops show up.
Ghost does the time not for the killing but for not delivering Shella up as a witness the DA wants to interrogate. What follows Ghost’s release is an odyssey though some of the most nightmarish settings in American literature, the most noir landscape imaginable.
The characters that populate this book are strangely compelling, both the good guys and the bad guys. The most complex is Ghost, who gets no thrill out of killing but approaches it as a professional charged with an assignment that he carries out with cunning efficiency. He does not kill for the sake of killing. In one night scene as Ghost is staking out a hit, two Hispanics rob him of $300. The robbery was the cost of doing business.
In a more telling scene, a mobster’s bodyguard who after loosing to Ghost in a pool game provokes him into a knife fight. The mobster and others made bets on the outcome. Ghost easily dispatches his opponent.
Ghost is the book’s narrator. "We all went downstairs. Some of the guys paid money to Monroe (the mobster). I saw the money on the table. Monroe separate some of it, gave it to me (though Ghost refuses to take it). He saw I was looking at the money that was left.
"‘That’s the difference between you and me Ghost,’ he said. ‘Don’t ever forget it.’"
If you’re looking for a first rate noir mystery, Shella will deliver in spades. It is the only book so far from writer Andrew Vachss that is not about New York City detective Burke and his extended family of associates.
|
i