With Christmas approaching, I'm looking for books for a dear friend who loves Las Vegas, but for health reasons can't make the trip anymore. Being mostly housebound, she devours fiction and I'd like to gift her a Las Vegas novel or two. Can you recommend recent ones that she probably hasn't heard about or gotten around to reading yet if she has?
As a matter of fact, we can. Two have come out recently, both of which we had in a hand in, though we didn't publish them.
The first is called Hammer of the Dogs. It might not be up your friend's alley, but it is ours! It's written by Jarret Keene, a name with which anyone who's read an annual Vegas Writes anthology over the last several years will be familiar; Jarret is the editor. He's also an assistant professor in the UNLV English Department, where he teaches American literature and the graphic novel. And he's a good friend.
Hammer is a post-apocalyptic story set in the nuked wasteland of Las Vegas where survival under ordinary circumstances is difficult at best. But forget about ordinary circumstances. Dystopian Vegas is now ruled by opposing warlords locked in a death struggle, one from the top of Aria, the other from the basement of Luxor. The protagonist and heroine, 21-year-old Lash, is about to graduate (meaning get evicted) from the paramilitary school at Luxor. From her command center there, she's been shielding Vegas survivors, plus her younger classmates, from the predations and depredations of the other warlord. But when he captures her, she learns that he’s not the homicidal monster her headmaster wants her to believe he is. In fact, he not only recruits her to his cause, but steals her heart.
This a YA (young adult) novel, but with decidedly mature themes. It highlights the courage of a new generation that has to reclaim the world from those who ruined it and explores the difficult choices a conscionable young woman must make with her back against a blood-spattered wall. Drone warfare, bloodthirsty flamingos, Mad Max machines, monstrous genetics, sports betting on gladiator fights to the death, and of course the fierce reinvention of Armageddon Vegas -- Hammer of the Dogs is a cautionary tale for the ages.
The second book is slightly less feral, but no less gripping. This one, Four Acres by Bob Waldman, takes place in the past instead of the future and we suspect it will probably be more to your friend's liking. We loved it when we read it in manuscript form (and offered a few suggestions for making it even better).
The protagonist is 24-year-old Calvin Wilkerson, a fictionalized version of the son of Billy Wilkerson, the real-life L.A. restaurant and nightclub owner, founder/publisher of The Hollywood Reporter, and original developer of the Flamingo in Las Vegas. Calvin, who barely knows his father, accompanies him to Las Vegas -- this is in the mid-1940s -- soon after he's dishonorably discharged from the Navy. There, he's introduced to his father's "business associates" and gets a job working at a gas station on Fremont Street owned by the sinister Ed Kiel, of the Kiel clan who date all the way back to the 1880s. On the infamous Kiel ranch, Archibald Stewart, husband of Helen Stewart, First Lady of Las Vegas, was shot to death by a ranch hand; 20 years later, the Kiel brothers themselves were killed in a gunfight in which Helen might or might not have had a hand.
Calvin has a chance meeting with Helen Stewart's granddaughter Lena. Through Lena, Calvin is drawn deeper and deeper into Fremont Street's dark corners, aided along the way by others from Vegas' past: Pop and Mom Squires who know where all the bodies are buried; the Paiute elder Benny Hawk; Moe Sedway and Ben Siegel; and the ghost of Helen Stewart herself, among others. We can tell you that one of the climactic scenes in Bugsy's office at the Flamingo with Billy and Calvin Wilkerson and Moe Sedway is worth the entire price of admission -- and more.
This is a momentous and decisive period in Las Vegas history and Bob Waldman does a downright masterful job of evoking the '40s' milieu and context and bringing to life not only the contemporary characters, but also the spirits that haunted and hunted them. Better yet, Bob is an LVA member who tells us he reads QoD every day. And best of all, the paperback at $8.50 (along with the ebook at 99 cents) is a true Las Vegas bargain; both are available on Amazon.
We can't recommend Four Acres highly enough. If you do buy it and like it as much as we do, a review on Amazon will be most welcome.
And on the chance that your friend hasn't seen our own fiction, you can check out The House Always Wins, Becoming Bobby, and Risk of Ruin. They're not what we'd call recent, but they're definitely worth reading.
