The Wrong Thing (Switchblade) by Barry Graham

Barry Graham’s THE WRONG THING isn’t about a madman with a thirst for bloodletting, more so a young man who takes to violence as a means to an end. Knowing little by way of problem solving skills, any hurdles in his way succumb to brutality as bikies, police, and innocents feel the wrath of the urban badlands walking myth. I first read Barry Graham in 1997 when I found a copy of Before at The Strand in NYC. Like most books you find by a new author it was the cover that caught my eye, the back cover text that sold me. It was a great find, I devoured it, loved it, but then I never found anything by Graham again.

The Wrong Thing" was a serious genre stretch for me-I don't read a lot of crime fiction, and only picked this up because of my PM Press membership. I read the novel, or more properly novella, on a lazy Saturday morning, and for that purpose it was enjoyable. The book follows the brief life of The Kid, a young man of Latino heritage who falls into a lifestyle of crime.

Barry Graham is a Zen monk and an award-winning, internationally acclaimed author and journalist. He has written for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including Harper's, and his works include Before, The Book of Man, and Get Out as Early as You Can. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Библиографические данные. The Wrong Thing Switchblade Series.

The Kid liked doing that too, going into his parents’ house and sitting in their living room reading a history book. His father would have come home from his warehouse job and would be watching TV or talking with Celeste. His mother would be in the kitchen, making dinner.

They call him the Kid. He's a killer, a dark legend of the Southwest's urban badlands, "a child who terrifies adults. They speak of him in whispers in dive bars near closing time. Some claim to have met him. Others say he doesn't exist, a phantom blamed for every unsolved act of violence, a ghost who haunts every blood-splattered crime scene.

The Wrong Thing - Barry Graham. This is what they are saying about him: The Kid? Yes, I knew him, and I know his mother and father too. The Kid sold drugs and killed people. So all their relatives started calling him the same thing. As he grew up, it was how he thought of himself, whenever he did. He had a younger sister, but she was called Celeste and he was still the Kid. Celeste never seemed to have a problem with anything. The Kid just couldn’t seem to get anything right; he always had to know why things were as they were. His parents were second-generation Mexican-American, and they didn’t speak Spanish, though they had the accent. They spoke the slang of the barrio they lived in.

A dark Latino legend of the Southwest's urban badlands, the kid is spoken of in whispers in dive bars near closing time. Some claim to have met him, and others say he doesn't exist-a phantom blamed for every unsolved act of violence, a ghost who haunts every blood-splattered crime scene. In reality, he is young man with a love of cooking and reading, an abiding loneliness, and an appetite for violence.

This is the first book by Barry Graham I've read. He's definitely going on my list of future eBooks. The first thing that came up to my mind when I finished WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN TO DUST is that I'm glad that people like Barry Graham exist. People who keep things in perspective and who understand that life is complex and flowing thing, like a river. Even better, he wrote a book of fiction about it to make his point.