Lazy Sunday Service

I finished reading Hard Bite by Anonymous-9 last Thursday and it's been rattling around my head ever since.  Just when you think there's no more angles left to explore in crime fiction, along comes a book with a fresh perspective.  Here's the opening page:

"I like to kill people. 

It's important to admit the truth to yourself even if you lie to others, and I do a lot of lying in my business. Inside my head I try to keep the truth black and white, no grey area: I like to kill. I love to kill people. Certain people. 

Sid knows we're going somewhere tonight because my eyes keep flicking to the clock, and it usually means we've got a job to do. 

I found my latest target online at a news site. A national story local to Los Angeles. Killing locally is a necessity since I'm not really mobile. A Mac with assistive technologies enables me to work the keyboard. 

Assistive technology is a code word for "stuff that helps cripples use a computer." Easy to understand, right? Because it's the truth. People have a hard time with truth when it comes bent and deformed, crushed, or hideous—so they invent terms like assistive technologies to sidestep the one word that makes it crystal clear: cripple. 

Crippled. 

Crippling.

I went from noun to action verb riding a year-long bed of pain. After flirting with suicide, which lost its appeal contemplated deeply, a fresh start in rough justice sounded right. Why settle for cripple when you can be crippling, ha ha. 

I admit, I don't look very imposing. It's my motorized wheelchair, the steel hand, my pencil neck that looks like it could flop over and crack from the weight of my head. I look useless, you think. You think wrong. And fuck you, by the way, for your perception. I bring righteous vengeance to evil people."

You've got to keep reading, right?  Well, I did as I was already hooked at this point.  I'll post my review tomorrow, but needless to say, Hard Bite was one of my favourite reads of the last couple of years. 



My posts this week:

Review of The Diggers Rest Hotel by Geoffrey McGeachin
Social media etc
New EU university ranking exercise - U-Multirank
Review of City of Heretics by Heath Lowrance
January reading
The signal in the noise