The Shady Side of the Street: Author Doug Turnbull Reviews Sweet Violent Femmes

Think of Mayfield, USA, a quiet suburban neighborhood with sunny, well-tended lawns, wide, clean streets, kindly dads wearing patches on their jacket sleeves, and happy children whose greatest care in the world is a flat tire on their bicycle. Once you open the first page of Holly Kothe’s Sweet Violent Femmes, you know you aren’t on that street in Mayfield. This is another street. You know the one I’m talking about. The worst street in the worst part of town, where there is no sunny side; both sides are as shady as the people there. And at night, well, with all the street lights broken, the rats come out and take over. You’ve met them, or at least seen them through your car window: drug dealers, whores, grifters, pimps, junkies, panhandlers, winos, gangsters, and thirteen-year-old gangster wannabees. The refuse of society living in society’s refuse. Even the cops don’t come here at night. But you’re safe. It’s just a book, right? You can always close it and chase away the darkness by turning on the lights. Except that part will be hard, because Ms. Kothe’s characters will grab you and hold you there, in her book, on that dark street, populated by lost souls, who wouldn’t exist but for their flaws.

The protagonists in all four stories are women, women who have one thing in common: violence. They are all killers, killing for vengeance, killing by accident, killing in anger, or killing out of hatred. These women don’t wait for the hooded man with the scythe to do the deed, they grasp it from his hand and do it themselves. Why would I want to read about such monsters, you ask? Because all of the women are fully fleshed-out people, people you might occasionally catch a glimpse of in the mirror every day. For who among us hasn’t had a dark thought, a hatred, a desire for revenge, and wished we had the courage to act on that wicked thought? These young women do act, and they do the deeds we only fantasize about.

An American prostitute working at a high-end brothel in Paris, who has her own unique way of dealing with a wealthy and sadistic patron; an attractive coed who exacts vengeance on an abusive stepfather; a young woman who doesn’t take being jilted by her lover lightly; another who awakens in a strange place, with a strange man, and has no idea how she came to be there; all are well drawn characters, who in turn draw the reader into their fractured lives. Once you meet these women, you will be compelled to read their stories. They’re like the girl or guy you fall for, even though you know they are bad. You can’t help yourself.

Horror may not be your thing (it usually isn’t mine), but this is not the ordinary horror of ghosts and goblins—of the supernatural; rather, it is the horror of the monster that lives in all of us, and most of us keep it at bay. If you’re up for that, then this is the book for you. Take a walk down that dark street, become one of them, just for an evening. Come on, you don’t have to stay, you know you want to, come and enjoy the 101 too short pages of Sweet Violent Femmes.

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About the Guest Blogger

Doug Turnbull is the author of several books including Zachary Dixon: Officer Apprentice, Footprints In Red, Jupiter IV and The Man Who Conquered Mars, The Future Revisited, We Are The Martians; has over 130 podcasts on the subjects of science, science fiction and the future; and is an occasional contributor of non-fiction articles about space flight to Space.com, Astronomie Quebec, the Royal Astronomical Society, and other online publications. He has been a guest of Alan Boyle on NBC News, at the University Of Hawaii Astronomy Department, and at The Mars Society speaking on space science subjects. In 2013, his short story Tenderfoot won The Mars Society-Bulgaria’s Editor’s Choice award for short science fiction. Visit Doug's Amazon page here.