Punisher Max: Untold Tales - Jason Starr, Megan Abbott, et al.

I remember buying the issue of THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN in which The Punisher made his first appearance. Even then I knew, hey, this guy's an Executioner rip-off. And all these years later, it's still sort of true, but I don't care. Frank Castle has become an interesting character in his own right, and I enjoy reading about him.

Until now, though, I hadn't read any Punisher stories from Marvel's Max line. These are their more adult comics, which means, of course, that the violence is more graphic and there's more cussin'. I picked up PUNISHER MAX: UNTOLD TALES not only out of curiosity but also because two of the five stand-alone stories in this trade paperback collection were written by people I know, Jason Starr and Megan Abbott.

Starr's story, "Jimmy's Collision", leads off the volume. That's the name of the business run by the story's protagonist, who has a gambling problem and an even bigger problem when his bookie offers him a way out that involves murder. As in his novels, Starr skillfully ratchets up the tension as Jimmy makes bad decision after bad decision that eventually wind up involving The Punisher in his life, which is hardly ever a good thing.

Megan Abbott, with her history of writing domestic noir, may seem like an odd choice at first to write a Punisher yarn, but her story, "The Ribbon" is excellent, a morality play about a doomed summer romance and a fateful encounter at a bus stop. Like "Jimmy's Collision", it's a story about how decisions come back to haunt us, sometimes with tragic results. And as you'd expect from Abbott, the writing is both terse and graceful.

The other stories include "Where the Devil Don't Stay" by Jason Latour, in which The Punisher encounters a family of murderous Tennessee hillbillies; "Manhunt" by Nathan Edmondson, a more traditional tale about The Punisher taking on a ring of gangsters that deals in sex slaves (there's a fairly nice twist in this one); and "A Little About Revenge" by Skottie Young, an offbeat story in which not a shot is fired, making it a real rarity for a Punisher tale.

I haven't said anything about the art. Each story has a different artist, none of whom I'd ever heard of. Some of the art I liked fairly well, some I didn't care for. That's pretty much par for the course in modern comics.

Of the five stories, the best two are by Jason Starr and Megan Abbott. No surprise there. But the other stories are good, too, and the entire volume is well worth reading. I don't really need anything else on my plate, but I may have to find some more of these Punisher Max collections.

Fake I.D. - Jason Starr

I’ve seen a lot of positive comments from Juri Nummelin and others about this book, which previously had been published only in England, and I’ve enjoyed the other Jason Starr novels I’ve read (including PANIC ATTACK, just a few weeks ago), so when Hard Case Crime recently reprinted it, I picked up a copy. FAKE I.D. is narrated by Tommy Russo, a bar bouncer and would-be actor in New York who’s struggling with a compulsive gambling problem. One of Tommy’s racetrack acquaintances invites him to join a syndicate that’s being put together to buy a race horse. All Tommy has to do is come up with $10,000 to buy in. Being the confident kind of guy he is, he’s sure he’ll be able to do that.

Of course, it doesn’t turn out to be that easy. Every plan Tommy comes up with seems to go wrong, and sometimes they go wrong in spectacular ways. But Tommy plows right ahead, always sure that he’s doing the right thing and that it’s all going to work out for him.

I’m not sure there’s anybody better than Jason Starr at creating likable characters the reader will root for, then having them turn out to be absolute monsters. Tommy is maybe the best example of that I’ve come across yet. He struggles along through his life and you actually start to hope that things will work out for him, and then, with no sign whatsoever of remorse, he does something totally despicable. And this happens more than once along the way to a really powerful ending.

I could see this same set-up working for one of the late Donald E. Westlake’s comic crime novels, but of course Starr takes the story in very different directions. His prose is smooth and he keeps the pace racing right along, and the result is one of the more enjoyable novels I’ve read recently. FAKE I.D. veers into some pretty dark territory at times, but I was glad to go along for the ride. I think it’s the best Jason Starr novel I’ve read so far. Highly recommended.

Panic Attack - Jason Starr

I haven’t read much by Jason Starr – his novel NOTHING PERSONAL and his first collaboration with Ken Bruen for Hard Case Crime, BUST – but I liked both of those books, so I decided to give his newest one a try. PANIC ATTACK is more of a mainstream thriller than either of the other two Starr novels I’d read, but with his own distinctive spin on the material.

It begins with a crime – a couple of burglars breaking into the house of psychologist Adam Bloom. Bloom confronts the burglars with a gun and shoots and kills one of them. The other one gets away and decides to take revenge on Bloom for killing his partner, and that revenge involves Bloom’s wife and daughter.

That’s really the entire plot of the book, but it’s a lot more emotionally complex than it sounds because Starr takes the reader into the heads of all the characters involved, often covering the same events from different perspectives. Most of the time I don’t care much for that technique, but Starr makes it work in this book. Even though none of the characters are very likable (something other readers have pointed out about Starr’s work), they’re all intensely human and you can’t help but want to find out what happens to them, even the evil ones. (And the villain in this book is really evil.) Starr had me flipping the pages and staying up late to finish.

PANIC ATTACK will be out later this summer from St. Martin’s/Minotaur. It’s certainly not what you’d call a breezy beach read, but it’s very well written and worth checking out if you’re a fan of noir fiction.