Sean’s Literary Corner: Autumn demands a grim noir

Acclaimed writer Nic Pizzolatto weaves a haunting yarn set in the muggy South.

Sean Hanson, Columnist

Novembers are special in Minnesota. The whole state is terrifically moody as seasonal decay takes hold of the land. Trees sputter their final orange gasps into the wind as it shakes their fiery canopies loose, casting leaves to the ground to become fodder for the imaginations of children. The sky turns darker each day in ominous little gradations until at last grey settles all along the horizon. Obese clouds shield those with paler complexions from the sun’s harsh rays, dumping snow in flirtatious episodes that run the gamut from pleasant early morning dustings to surprise overnight blankets that demand snowplows.

Though the weather has hardly been the state’s characteristic chill of late, these moody autumn trappings will arrive nonetheless. They conjure visions of tightly wrapped scarves, pumpkin-flavored foods and Thanksgiving turkey. They also necessitate equally moody reading material to complement the frosty death that will creep over the land. My mind, confronted with the prospect of another Minnesota winter, flees to warmer climates. Texas is the setting, and “Galveston,” by Nic Pizzolatto, is the novel.

Pipers who know their television will perk up at the name. Pizzolatto rocketed to fame within small screen circles in 2014 after creating the hit series “True Detective.” The first season of “Detective” starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as two Louisiana detectives tasked with finding the perpetrator of a grisly, cultish murder. In the course of their investigation, they learn to begrudgingly respect one another in spite of starkly different personalities, with McConaughey as the brooding pessimist and Harrelson as the more upbeat Texas tough-guy. The bounds of their sanities are tested as they descend into a swampy world rife with drugs, institutional corruption, backwoods rituals and other dark acts.

The first season is a Southern Gothic with no easy answers, taking a page from Thomas Ligotti’s bleak philosophical musings and turning to nihilistic thought in the face of the most horrific crimes, so much so that the show becomes borderline Lovecraftian in theme. Though season two of “True Detective” strays from the Southern setting, taking the form of a West Coast neo-noir a la Black Dahlia, Pizzolatto still has more crime fiction in him to set in the South. Or rather, “Galveston” was his initial foray into Southern Gothicism, being his first published novel and preceding “True Detective” by four years.

“Galveston” follows an aging crook named Roy Cady who is diagnosed with a terminal illness on the same day in which his loan shark boss decides that he is no longer useful. Cady survives the initial set-up designed to take his life, but finds himself on the run with a young prostitute-to-be, Rocky, who also narrowly escapes death, and her three-year-old sister Tiffany. Together this odd band must seek obscurity in the hot landscape of Texas with hitmen in pursuit.

Each of the characters in “Galveston” are like rejects from the Island of Misfit Toys, struggling to reckon with their lowly circumstances and having no great amount of hope in improving their station. Roy possesses a dull regret for his life as a lowlife as he becomes starkly aware of his mortality, finding some little comfort in helping Rocky and Tiffany make it by. Rocky struggles to raise Tiffany as best she can with characteristic spunk and toughness earned from a dark, impoverished background. The odd characters they meet as they flee seem to be struggling to find their own meaning in the Texas heat. “You’re here because it’s somewhere,” says Roy. “Dogs pant in the streets. Beer won’t stay cold. The last new song you liked came out a long, long time ago, and the radio never plays it anymore.”

The past is an important motif in the novel as Roy frequently meditates on how the past shapes a person and if someone can truly move beyond it. The plights of Roy and Rocky and the various characters they encounter are perhaps best summarized through one of Roy’s musings, as he says, “Certain experiences you can’t survive, and afterward you don’t fully exist, even if you failed to die.”

The story pulls no punches and does not insult the reader’s intelligence. It is a moody blend of noir, Southern Gothicism and a splash of high-noon-Western. Fans of Cormac McCarthy will find a lot to like here. So if the early dusks, brisk winds or just the prospect of a Cheeto commanding the oval office have you in a funk, pick up “Galveston” and work through that feeling. Explore it. For as Roy says in the novel, “When it worked, reading could take away the burden of time.”