Regarding the question in my title, that could be on me…I like to read dark stuff. I’m used to it and I like it. This? Not so much.
The premise of Jack of Spades is very similar to Stephen King’s Dark Half except without any (possible) supernatural elements. The fact that Stephen King gets referenced throughout this book made it all the more strange to me but in a good way. Where Dark Half is brutal and scary (or maybe it’s not now that I think about the absorbed twin part…hmmm… I can’t remember when I read it, but it was a very, very long time ago), Jack of Spades allows us to watch a man descend into madness only to find out that he may have been mad all along.
Andrew Rush is an acclaimed author. Unbeknownst to his wife and three grown children, he has begun to write under the obvious pseudonym of Jack of Spades. Jack of Spades novels would never be mistaken for Rush’s work as they are brutal, misogynistic and masochistic; these books written in the style of the old pot boiler novels of Hammett and others but dark, dark, dark. As he writes he doesn’t even have to think about plot, he just sips some whiskey and writes on autopilot, the plots just come to him. His daughter finds one of the books and reads it, recognizing a moment from her own life as a child that is depicted in the story. When she was young, she fell through a rotted board in a bridge and was a stroke of luck that she survived the accident. In the book, there are different results and in fact, the accident was caused by the character’s stepfather. Rush tries to calm his daughter but she is sure that this author is evil and knows the family. At the same time Rush gets sued by a woman who has been habitually suing famous authors stating that they have been harassing her, coming into her home and stealing her ideas. The woman basically gets laughed out of the court room but the fact that she sued Andrew Rush opens something up in him and Jack of Spades begins running the show. And that my friends is where I’m going to leave off talking about the plot because I have a habit of giving away too much.
Oates is typically a writer whom I like to read, and it’s an interesting premise for sure…but I didn’t love this book. I get that there are tongue in cheek references (particularly with the self-publishing world) and the use of several famous characters as plagiarists was pretty fun but man, I wanted more of the crazy. Andrew Rush as a character has the potential to be something like a Patrick Bateman type character but it never quite goes far enough to make me care. I was mildly interested in Rush, but Oates has the chance to really take him to that level but even the horrific events from his past aren’t enough to do it for me. The book is incredibly short and I’m not entirely sure if Oates didn’t pull a pseudonym stunt on us and let someone else write it. I was happy to close the cover and pick up something else almost immediately, and that’s never a good sign.
