Oregon, 1851. Eli and Charlie Sisters, notorious professional killers, are on their way to California to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm. On the way, the brothers have a series of unsettling and violent experiences in the Darwinian landscape of Gold Rush America. Charlie makes money and kills anyone who stands in his way; Eli doubts his vocation and falls in love. And they bicker a lot. Then they get to California, and discover that Warm is an inventor who has come up with a magical formula, which could make all of them very rich. What happens next is utterly gripping, strange and sad. Told in deWitt's darkly comic and arresting style, THE WARM JOB is the kind of Western the Coen Brothers might write - stark, unsettling and with a keen eye for the perversity of human motivation. Like his debut novel ABLUTIONS, THE WARM JOB is a novel about the things you tell yourself in order to be able to continue to live the life you find yourself in, and what happens when those stories no longer work. It is an inventive and strange and beautifully controlled piece of fiction, which shows an exciting expansion of Dewitt's range
This feels like it was made to be a Tarantino movie. The characters, the dialogue, the bloodbaths all save Tarantino the trouble of botching the source material. And that’s fine— it’s entertaining— it just means the story didn’t do much for me beyond being a story that I read for a few hours and forget when I’m done. Until the movie comes out.
ETA: okay, apparently an adaptation is in the works. And it’s not Tarantino. So we’ll see how that goes.
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29 November, 2011:
Reviewed
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29 November, 2011:
Reviewed