Moondog Over The Mekong: Short Stories by Court Merrigan

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MOONDOVER OVER THE MEKONG: stories of guns, gambling, girls and general mayhem that redraw the borders of crime. This globe-spanning collection rockets you from dirt-road trailer parks to the slums of Bangkok, the gangster underbelly of Tokyo to a postapocalyptic Old West. There's girls on the run from Russian mobsters in the sex capital of Asia while a retiring crank cooker's ill-gotten fortune goes up for grabs on a Wyoming backroad. And a whole lot of territory in between. These ain't your typical crime stories. PRAISE: "Spanning the slums from Thailand to Wyoming, Moondog embraces the plight of the downtrodden as it exposes an underworld seldom seen. These are the stories of the beaten-down and betrayed who have been pushed to the brink, the street urchins and mob underlings who claw and scrape and fight like hell when presented with a way out, and Merrigan captures these liminal moments with blinding lucidity, and in the process pulls off the nearly impossible: extracting hope from what was once hopeless." -- Joe Clifford, author of Choice Cuts and Wake the Undertaker "A dagger in the guts and a jaunt through the back alleys of Southeast Asia. Where else can you get both for $2.99?" -- Jake Needham, author of KILLING PLATO and other best-selling Asian crime novels "The thing that stands out to me about Merrigan's writing is the way he absolutely nails the humanity of each story. Whether talking about American meth dealers or Asian gangsters or Old West outlaws, Merrigan is able to zero in on the essence of his characters with laser-like accuracy, bringing each to life in a way that's both vivid in its detail and mundane in its capturing of everyday life, no matter where in the world that life may be unfolding. This is damn fine storytelling, folks." -- Elizabeth White "As best I can tell, Court Merrigan doesn't just never flinch on the page, I'm not sure he even knows how to flinch. And he knows some stuff that'll make you nervous." -- Stephen Graham Jones, author of Demon Theory and Growing Up Dead In Texas Merrigan understands that buckets of blood and over-the-top violence are only two elements of crime fiction, so he digs deeper to produce stories that conjure up a dazzling array of feelings and take place in a range of settings that go from a Las Cruces-bound Greyhound bus to the dark waters of the Mekong river. Along the way, the author manages to expose the best and worst of human nature and to entertain readers with a collection of twelve tales in which there are no throwaways. There is plenty of brutality, but it's delivered with a nonchalance that communicates the fact that the author is not trying to use it as hook. There's also a lot of emotional writing, but the straightforward prose makes it all feel real and it never comes close to being sappy. While the elements just mentioned above make this a good read, what ultimately pushed it into must-read terrain is the almost cinematic graininess of Merrigan's prose. Equally honest, touching, and brutal, Moon Over the Mekong is short crime fiction for those that think crime writing should never be formulaic." - Gabino Iglesias, Out of the Gutter "One of the widest ranges of settings this side of a James Rollins novel." -- Ryan Sayles