Learning 'The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death'

Review: THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH (Ballantine Books 2009)
Author, Charlie Huston

THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH is a title so long I thought I'd forget it after reading it once, but I didn't. Somehow I was able to remember all those words. And it sounded interesting . . . so . . .

It's the story of Webster Fillmore Goodhue (otherwise known as Web) who is an LA slacker with issues who likes to sleep a lot and is spending his days doing so at the home of (what we are led to believe is) his one last friend in the world. Why? Because like I said, Web has issues. Big issues. Issues that make him want to sleep and, I guess, keep house now and then because he mentions doing that, too. So, anyway . . .

Web is the son of a stoner mom in Oregon and a disaffected screenwriter in LA--both of whom he keeps at a distance, for reasons that are revealed later. But first . . . did I mention his friend was a tattoo artist who does body piercing? No? Well, it doesn't really matter.

What matters is that the tattoo artist has to have his various types of hazardous medical waste disposed of by a huge person named Po Sin. Po Sin offers Web a job. Not disposing of hazardous waste, actually, but cleaning up scenes where death has occurred.Thus, the name of the book. (Which echoes a theme in the book that relates to Web's issues. How clever. I'm not being sarcastic here. It's really very clever.) Web helps clean up messy scenes of death. You know, like crime scenes and such.

Or messy suicides, and Web ends up working on just such a scene, when he meets a woman. A woman who will eventually lead to (what else but) trouble.

Charlie Huston has an unusual edgy style. He doesn't use quotes. Instead, he puts long dashes in front of the dialogue. Sort of like this (and I'm totally making this up here):

--How's it going.
I didn't care, but it seemed like the thing to ask.
--Fine, fine. How are you?
Like he gave a shit. He didn't care any more about how I was than I did about him.
--I'm doing great.
What a crock. I felt lower than whale shit, but I didn't feel like going into all that with a guy who didn't really give a shit about me to begin with.

Yeah, kind of like that with those kinds of four-letter words (just a warning to those who are put off by them, which I'm not). Huston's writing is filled with edgy banter (real banter, not that silly conversation I just wrote) interlaced with Web's unvarnished thoughts in all their cynical glory (kind of like I just wrote). And I should mention here that involves all sorts of gross descriptions of various types of death and such, but that's to be expected when someone's working a job that involves scraping people's brains off the walls--I mean, am I right?

It's the kind of writing that sucked me right in from page one and kept me going. So when I first picked up the book, I didn't stop reading until page 49--I zipped those first 49 like they were nothing. Highly unusual for me to read so many pages right off the bat.

The only place where things seem to slow a bit is when you get to the "big explanation" stage. You know, the part where the protagonist is figuring out what's really going on. But by then, you're so far into the book, it hardly matters and you keep going because you want to find out how this thing ends. And see if Web solves his big issues.

And let's just say the ending is satisfying and not quite what I expected. Which is a huge compliment from this reader.