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Lead character transcends ‘job title’
Book Review
By Derryll White
Faust, Christa (2011). Choke Hold.
Christa Faust belongs with Hard Case Crime, the publishers of this novel. I instantly believed she had lived at least some of Angel Dare’s hard-core pulp life. She reaches way back to Mickey Spillane, Kaminsky and other hardboiled authors for the growl and grit in her writing. It is exciting, in an age of political correctness and newspeak, to read a writer who tells it exactly like it is on the street. Her gut shot character smells of shit. Her porn star heroine deals blow jobs like pocket change. Old and politically incorrect as I am, I love it.
Faust tears the wings off the porn industry, then pins it to a corkboard and mounts it like an insect for examination. She reveals how it takes needy young women and uses them up – money, cocaine and harsh control and intimidation being the tools used. She is not kind, but she is informed. Her mistakes are small, such as calling a Buick a “Bonneville” when all Bonnevilles were Pontiacs.
Christa Faust describes herself as “an unconventional, kinky, pansexual pervert” standing outside the defined and approved sex and gender roles. And that is how she writes. In ‘Choke Hold’ her central character, Angel Dare, does that, combining soft mothering thoughts with direct hared action. The reader wants Angel to transcend her history and become so much more than a porn queen. For me she does this in spades.
****
Excerpts from the novel:
STYLE – He was trying a little too hard and wore bad-ass like a brand new pair of boots that hadn’t quite broken in yet. …Cocky, like some hot young gun who thinks he doesn’t need Viagra for his first scene.
BUSINESS – The wife looked like she should be in the business. Bright red Miss America hair. Big fake tits. Collagen trout-pout. Tiny, surgically bobbed button nose. Her body was flawless, jacked and shredded, with an astounding bubble butt that looked like it could crack walnuts.
TRAVELING – We had been driving through dusty Mexico nothing for so long, I would have gotten white-line fever if there had been any lines on the rutted dirt road. When we passed a dead car, it seemed way more exciting than it should have. A sad cluster of cement-block houses seemed like a bustling town.
CONTROL – My immediate instinct was to turn the embrace sexual. To take the wheel and move things back into my area of expertise. Sex for me has always been so easy. Men are simple mechanisms, comforting in their predictability.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
