Name: Galveston
ISBN: 9788416237005

Nic Pizzolatto

In this debut novel by the creator of the True Detective series, Roy Cody is a professional hit man living in New Orleans. His world is turned upside down when he is diagnosed with cancer. He is convinced that his boss, extortionist Stan Ptitko, wants to do away with him. He decides to break all ties and sets out for the unknown, hoping to find new meaning to his life.

Galveston

After being diagnosed with lung cancer, Roy Cady kills the men hired by his loan shark boss to kill him, and flees to Galveston, Texas, with a prostitute and her young sister, where they face more problems.

A Novel

Fraser Simons

Probably a 3.5. The prose are great and there’s some time jumping such as you might expect with the person who wrote True Detective, but it isn’t quite as well implemented. The story starts off very tropey and throws one curveball but most of the pleasure is in the prose. 

You can pretty much tell how the story will end despite a time jump that both relieves some tension and sets up something new, not quite nailing it, and the middle drags slightly. Feels like a writer still trying to figure out what they like about structure and what they really have to say.

Valentina Di Martino

Qui trovate qualche mio pensiero su Galveston...

http://lunicornoladazelarmadio.it/gal...

Recalling the moody violence of the early novels of Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson, a dark and visceral debut set along the seedy wastelands of Galveston by a young writer with a hard edge to his potent literary style On the same day that Roy Cady is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he senses that his boss, a dangerous loan-sharking bar-owner, wants him dead. Known “without affection” to members of the boss’s crew as “Big Country” on account of his long hair, beard, and cowboy boots, Roy is alert to the possibility that a routine assignment could be a deathtrap. Which it is. Yet what the would-be killers do to Roy Cady is not the same as what he does to them, which is to say that after a smoking spasm of violence, they are mostly dead and he is mostly alive. Before Roy makes his getaway, he realizes there are two women in the apartment, one of them still breathing, and he sees something in her frightened, defiant eyes that causes a fateful decision. He takes her with him as he goes on the run from New Orleans to Galveston, Texas—an action as ill-advised as it is inescapable. The girl’s name is Rocky, and she is too young, too tough, too sexy—and far too much trouble. Roy, Rocky, and her sister hide in the battered seascape of Galveston’s country-western bars and fleabag hotels, a world of treacherous drifters, pickup trucks, and ashed-out hopes. Any chance that they will find safety there is soon lost. Rocky is a girl with quite a story to tell, one that will pursue and damage Roy for a very long time to come in this powerful and atmospheric thriller, impossible to put down. Constructed with maximum tension and haunting aftereffect, written in darkly beautiful prose, Galveston announces the arrival of a major new literary talent.

Dan Denney

I really enjoyed this, one of those tales where you're rooting for the lesser evil.

Bryan Alexander

I read this because I liked True Detective very much.

Galveston is a noir crime tale, and very satisfying on those terms. Characters are low-lifes, broke and desperate. Entropy rules the world, spiked with violence.

The prose is excellent. P. offers lyrical descriptions of landscape and ruined humanity, along with tasty dialog. 

Interesting links to True Detective: one character reads Aleister Crowley while honing his safecracking skills. Texas and Louisiana are run-down, corrupt, violent. Male characters are violent, introspective, doomed. One character cuts humans figures out of beer cans (yes, Lone Star is mentioned). And the novel has a dual timeline, taking place in the 1980s and 2008.

Galveston

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