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Portland, Oregon, United States
Co-founder, co-editor of Gobshite Quarterly and Reprobate/GobQ Books

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Of course!

That's why books like Never Coming Back
"Struggling with fear, despair, and suspicious Swedish authorities when his wife fails to return home, Mike endures a nightmarish existence with his daughter, unaware that his vigil is being secretly filmed and shown to his wife by her abductors in a nearby cellar..."
have moved, like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, out of crime or mystery sections and into general fiction sections everywhere! It's the pandemic corruption.

General fiction has always covered war (Stendahl) adventure, comedy (Defoe), domestic fiction, adultery (Flaubert, Tolstoy), and horror (Shelley) - the plain bloodsimple used to be mystery (Hammett).

Between them the drug trade (begun in earnest during the Vietnam War and continued throughout the Latin American sectors of the Cold War and the Friedmanite collapse of the Soviet bloc) and the War on Terror have corrupted everything. Middle class reality (Chekhov, Cheever, Updike, stretching to Burroughs & Heller) is turned to genrefic.

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