This week we review Roots Down to Hell by Matthew Louis, with Big Philly (Philip M. Smith) (Philip M. Smith) of Vigilante Crime and Pulp guest co-hosting.
“No tree can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
That is Carl Jung, and it is where the book gets its title. Is it a mystery? You know what happened on the first page. The question is whether he is going to get away with it, and it does not look good for him from the very beginning, which is classic noir.
The protagonist is Kevin Chapman, early thirties, a recovered incel who never had a dad. He was rescued from the sit-in-the-house-being-a-weirdo lifestyle by his uncle Cliff, a drywall installer who took him to work and taught him how to hang sheetrock.
By the beginning of the book, Kevin is a working man, married about a year, and his wife Michelle is going to college on his money. He comes home on a Friday and she is on her way out the door. “So long, Kevin. I’ve fallen in love with a woman. I’m leaving you.”
An argument ensues. He punches her, she stabs him, he beats her to death with his grandmother’s maple rolling pin. That is not a spoiler - it all happens in the first five pages. What is left for Kevin is that he has to learn about violence.
Cliff’s refrain is that a man works. Cliff came of age when you showed up, made money, and life pretty much happened, and that is not the world Kevin has to live in. But a man works has a double meaning - a man performs work, and a man makes things work.
This is the whole mission of Vigilante Crime and Pulp: the classic sensibilities of mid-century crime fiction in contemporary settings, with the types of characters you actually know in real life.
It is a skilled, technically layered noir of shit going from bad to worse, and it hits on the culture of our times without being a political book. Roots Down to Hell is claustrophobic in all the best ways - the barn, the little house, a world closed in.
Mentioned in this episode: The Wrong Man; Augustine’s Confessions; our episodes on Everything on Black by F.T. Grant and Once Upon a Time in Argentina by Frank Kidd; Psycho Pulp, the Hitchcock-themed Vigilante Crime and Pulp anthology; and Louis’s next novel, The Meanest of Days.
Join us next time for Pandemonia by Centaur Write Satyr, PhD.
