Crowbar, by Andrew Edwards
A Tortuga Review
The core experience of the 2020s has been one of horrifying revelation. Either the greater transparency of a networked world is shining a light on things once hidden, or perhaps the powers that be are so confident of their position that they are allowing the mask to slip. Whatever the cause, in the last few years, the curtain has been pulled back to expose a whole world of things that should not be. Crowbar, the newly released novel from Andrew Edwards, imagines the roots of that world.
The novel is set in 1982, primarily in California and Oregon, amid the hedonic hangover of the 1960s. The false promises of peace, love and transcendence have given way a chaos of drugs, cults, and violence. Woodstock has become Jonestown. And below the surface, dark government research projects have merged with drug cartels and a technocratic elite to create an underworld like a bad acid trip.
Edwards spends a good portion of the book introducing characters and setting the scene. Cohen, the villain of the piece, is a shadowy government operative, drug-fueled and prone to wanton violence. He is part of a project called MK Omega; an operation to mass produce brainwashed killers by way of horrific psychological torture. Al and Jay are Rhodesian special operations veterans, set adrift by the fall of their homeland to Communism. There are many other characters, some actual historical figures and some fictional. Real: Robert Maxwell, much in the news of late. Michael Aquino, a real life Army psyops officer and dedicated Satanist. Jerry Garcia. Fictional: the brainwashed Satya, the nun Xenia, the shadowy technocrat Engelbart. And the enigmatic roadman, who is perhaps a time traveler, perhaps an angel, perhaps some sort of moral avatar. An honorary character is Orthodox mystic Seraphim Rose, whose death immediately precedes the opening of the book, and whose collected unpublished papers serve as the Macguffin of the novel.
The basic plot is fairly simple. Al and Jay take a job as bagmen for Cohen, and do his bidding until they are given a job too morally repugnant to complete, and then go rogue, with predictable consequences. Up against them are Cohen’s mind-wiped serial killers, drug cartel hit squads, and an American special operator now employed by Cohen.
This sounds like the premise for a shoot-em-up action thriller, but if you come to Crowbar looking for a Mack Bolan novel (look them up, kids, they were awesome!) you are going to be disappointed. The book opens with a quote from Blood Meridian, and McCarthy’s influence on the book is very clear. It is less a straightforward narrative than a painting made from words.
What McCarthy did with the violent Southwestern borderlands of the 19th century, Edwards now does with a time that served as prologue to our own era. The writing is deeply visual, with the meaning buried beneath the imagery. I found myself rereading passages simply so I could enjoy the pictures they created in my mind a second time. Like Blood Meridian, this is a book that improves with multiple readings. Meanings hide inside the images, rather than announcing themselves through dialog or exposition. If you are a person who wants a conventionally told story, this book is not for you.
The universe that McCarthy depicts in Blood Meridian is a harsh one, with God either indifferent or entirely absent. Crowbar, despite the horrifying violence and the glimpses of the hellish world below the surface of modernity, has something Blood Meridian lacks: a core of spirituality and hope. Despite the despair of their past and the dangerous uncertainty of their present, when confronted with something they know instinctively to be wrong, Al and Jay act with morality and honor. Cohen’s world is hell, but the very existence of that world requires the existence of something else.
Crowbar is a 5-star achievement, but it’s not for everyone. It’s best suited for readers who appreciate literary ambition in their thrillers, who want their genre fiction to challenge them formally as well as thematically. If you loved Blood Meridian but wished McCarthy had given you something to hold onto morally, if you’re fascinated by the hidden structures of power and control in modern society, if you believe violence in fiction should be rendered with both artistry and accuracy, then Andrew Edwards has written this book for you. It’s horrifying, beautiful, and deeply unsettling in equal measure.
Bottom line: A 5-star literary thriller with prose as vivid and uncompromising as Blood Meridian but anchored by a moral core, perfect for readers who want their genre fiction to function as art.
Read Crowbar by Andy Edwards.