Fiction Tuesday- Guys Named Bob

The title comes from Darlene's luck with guys named Bob

 

Truly, it has taken me a good long time to finish this little creepy masterpiece of Elisabeth Engstrom. 

For one thing, it's been on my Kindle and because I have "light" issues at night, I have been put off reading it. 

Actually, her paperbacks are quite expensive and Kindle is the only way I can manage to find her work. Of course, this isn't a book for everyone. She is far from mainstream and yet she gives a lot of realism to a slice of Americana that some would rather ignore. Her stories are character driven (which I love), the hopeless and damned dysfunctional family, and of course the earthiness of human nature.

The story starts out of a lonely woman, practically fifty who is hijacked by Molly who's got a loaded gun. She's taken to some remote shack where she meets Leathers who's got a mysterious hold on Molly's boyfriend Patrick.

And then comes the ransom. Big plans are made by Patrick and Molly while Darlene makes do and slowly becomes wayward with the tattoo artist Leathers. 

It's a slow burn of a story as the family wants their mother back. But her ex-husband has a new family and still wants to take matters into his own hands. It seems no one takes advice from the police. As the story lingers we get Molly's backstory and her need to go to Arizona to find her uncle whom she evidently had an epiphany of some kind.

Naturally, most of the cast is misunderstood. It has a certain horror that's no slasher film. But perhaps the pleasure and pain of life instead. And the lengths we go to, to keep it together. Yes, Engstrom shows the monster in each of us, and the power to go on to make a house a home, after all.