I hate blurbing. For one thing, I’m really bad at it. Some people can happily blurb a ham sandwich and make it sound like a feast, but I’m never going to be one of those people.

The worst part about it is that the more I love something, the harder it is for me to come up with something clever and convincing about how much I love it. I never want to resort to “(Author) is awesome” or “(Book) is awesome,” and I never want to just phone it in real quick so I can get back to work on my own weird little project.

This goes double for more lengthy introductions, normally an automatic hard no for me. But hear me out for a second here, Faustketeers, because Johnny Shaw’s Dove Season isn’t just a good book. It’s personal.

To that end, here is the introduction that I wrote for the new ebook edition, available everywhere right now.

***

I read Dove Season for the first time while my father was dying. 

A little on the nose, probably, but entirely accidental. When I picked this book up, I had no idea that the protagonist Jimmy Veeder’s father was also dying. All I knew was that Johnny Shaw, who I’d just met at Bouchercon that year, made me laugh. Like my father used to make me laugh. And here was a book that was, at its core, about fathers and their children making each other laugh.

Big Jack Veeder and Pop Faust had absolutely nothing in common, other than the cancer that was killing them. Big Jack was a tough old farmer who liked booze, brawling and Mexican sex workers. My father was a soft-hearted hippie musician who liked cats and the Marx Brothers and was really into loose-leaf tea.

In fact, there’s even a line where Jack jokes about “playing folk music in beatnik bookstores” that could have been poking direct fun at my father. But hey, they both liked to read. And to laugh.

One of the things that I always look for in crime fiction, or any kind of fiction really, is the feeling like I’m getting an insider's view into a foreign environment. A subculture or part of the world about which I know absolutely nothing. 

The sun-bleached, hardscrabble bordertowns of the working class Imperial Valley, where the overeducated and underemployed Jimmy Veeder and his crew of foul-mouthed, goofball losers were born and raised, may as well have been another planet to this NYC kid. But Shaw’s gritty, deeply affectionate descriptions brought that world to life for me. I never knew anybody like Snout or Buck Buck when I was growing up, but I know them now and somehow Shaw made me care about what happened to them. Root for them, even. His vivid, jocular and introspective prose made the unfamiliar setting feel intimately familiar, engaging all five senses to evoke a powerful sense of place. Sometimes a little too well, particularly when it comes to the sense of smell.

The story itself has kind of a double barreled structure, two halves, two deaths and a fuckload of consequences that dovetail (see what I did there?) into an unforgettable, slam-bang finale. Kind of like a heartfelt coming of age tale and a violent crime thriller had a drunken quickie in the dusty alley behind a bordertown bar and this book is the result.

When Jimmy goes home to settle up loose ends at the old family farm out in the desert between Holtville and Calexico, he gets tasked by his terminally ill father to find a missing hooker named Yolanda. I don’t have to tell you that nothing goes according to plan. What starts off as light-hearted, booze-fueled misadventure for old time’s sake quickly turns as deadly as his father’s cancer and Jimmy finds himself way over his head and on the business end of the Mexican mob.

Without launching into a whole dreary marketing comps pitch (Joe Lansdale this, Elmore Leonard that) let me just say that I would put this book, and most of Shaw's work really, into a category I call Chaos Noir. Yeah, ok, I just made that up, but hear me out… 

Chaos Noir is morally ambiguous at best, uninterested in restoring whatever passes for order in polite society and leans hard into unhinged and darky humorous chaos. Stories like these are like fuck-up breeder reactors, in which charming but perpetually unlucky misfits and weirdos are just trying to survive their own innate propensity for making bad things worse. The stakes tend to be small but the consequences are epic and always highly entertaining. Like the Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona or David J. Schow's Scoop stories, and yes Landsdale and Leonard too. This book is one of my personal favorite examples of that kind of storytelling. Maybe it even deserves its own sub category. Fiasco Noir, maybe? I like the sound of that.

A quick word about Bad Words.

Whenever anybody crows proudly about how "politically incorrect" their work is, I tend to nope the fuck out of whatever retrogressive horseshit they are trying to sell me. However, I do think there is a meaningful difference between portraying real human characters with unsanitized, offensive voices and constructing a whole-ass narrative around lionizing those attitudes. Jimmy’s buddies talk exactly like who they are, but they are certainly not trying to prove to you how cool and anti-woke they are either. They are just out there trying to survive their own self-inflicted chaos.

Pop Faust never got the Big Laugh in the end. He hadn’t been able to speak for months and stopped being able to communicate at all in those last few days. All he had left was music, and he caught the Westbound Train listening to Iris DeMent’s Out of the Fire. 

But I can promise that you will laugh till it hurts, probably more than once, while reading this book. You might even feel some of those embarrassing, sappy feelings that Jimmy and Jack worked so hard not to acknowledge. 

So grab yourself a cold one, maybe one of those goofy-looking neck fans and a shotgun too, because you never know when it might come in handy, and enjoy Dove Season.