The Price You Pay

Crazy Jack Price.

There's a line I've always joked about in my head. Standing on top of a bar with a broken bottle like fucking old skool is what:

MY NAME'S JACK. YOU DO WHAT I SAY, OR I'M THE PRICE YOU PAY!

I have noted before that I have a special affinity for transgressive crime fiction; in particular, books with philosophising sociopaths for main characters – Alex in A Clockwork Orange, Tyler Durden in Fight Club, everyone around Renton in Trainspotting – books that appear on the surface to be about isolated underworlds but which, as one reads on, reveal themselves to be perceptive revelations of the fundamental ills of the societies in which they're set. If these books also have challenging language and offrule syntax – if I need to slow down and almost translate the writing into ordinary English – so much the better. At first I thought The Price You Pay was exactly this kind of book – philosophising sociopathic main character (check), more cursing and violence than I would expect to encounter in real life (check), a winking disregard for formal grammar rules (check), the skewering of a societal malaise (check?) – but as the plot unspools and the details focus more on the gore than any attempt at a deeper meaning, I needed to downgrade my experience from, “This is great!” to, “This is fun.” And while I may have needed to lower my expectations of this book's literary merits as I went along, I do like to have fun, too. (Note: I read an ARC and quotes may not be in their final forms.)

I have a name. I have a name and a thin hard face with purple bootprints on it. I have thin lips split in three places and when I smile the teeth are like a quilt or maybe like geology. I have brown bedroom eyes that are swollen half shut, and my nose, my goddam nose, now is like a little bit of history repeating, like I should let my hair grow in Saigon and lose my job on the twenty-second floor and make a bad investment on a horse called Crossroad Guitar. Screw heredity and screw history and most of all screw you I have opinions. I have views. I am going to sit in the share chair and tell you a story.

When Jack Price wakes up one morning, he is dismayed to discover that the old woman who lived in the apartment below his has been killed – dismayed because, as a high-tech drug dealer who believes he has no traceable presence in the real world, he has to wonder if someone meant the assassin-style murder as a message to him. He asks a few questions of the investigating officers, and next thing you know, a couple of goons in party masks are stomping on his kidneys. Jack asks a few more questions, and when he discovers that an international assassination squad has been hired to take him down, he goes all dark web and only surfaces to confront the assassins one-by-one in a game of get-them-before-they-get-you. Jack's schemes are cartoonishly convoluted, involve increasingly bizarre levels of gore and violence, and are embarrassingly entertaining. 

Wall Street money is pirate money, loud and stupid and drunk, gets mugged in an alleyway and wakes up in the navy. My money is ninja money, strikes from the darkness, appears and disappears. Where do you keep your money Jack? Stuxnet baby. I keep my money in a digitally mobile distributed illegal wallet construct part-created by the NSA and stolen by @LuciferousYestergirl who is either a German anarchist or a Japanese-Nordic postdoc. When I want cash I push buttons and there is cash in a briefcase because I pay for it to happen. No one in the chain knows what they're handling or where it is going, just like my coke. The whole thing happens because water flows downhill. It happens the way an egg comes out of a chicken's vajayjay.

Well that image is gonna stay with me.

There are plenty of laughs along the way, and even though Jack is a nasty piece of work, you can't help but be on his side; this is an underdog, antihero tale of revenge – Pulp Fiction meets The Count of Monte Cristo – and it's a page-turner. As for its depth: Early on, Jack explains that he used to be a coffee importer (and apparently, the switch from coffee to coke didn't make a big difference in his professional world), until an acquaintance's death on 9/11 turned coffee “to ash” in his mouth. With a sporadic thread about the aftereffects of the trauma, and Jack explaining Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda's “understanding of theatrics” while planning some of his own, I thought that author Aiden Truhen (a pseudonym) might have had something important to say about where we find ourselves in a post-9/11 world – but other than the obvious effects it had on Jack's own psyche, there really isn't anything deeper or universal here. Still a fun read for people with a strong stomach – if this is the beginning of a series, sign me up. Three and a half stars that I am generously rounding up because pomelo cannon.