Hi Lo to Hollywood: A Max Evans Reader Book

I'd had this on my Amazon wishlist for about a year, then finally bought it and it sat on my Kindle for another few months before I read it. I don't know why I was dicking around so much, this book was pretty awesome.

It's ostensibly a short story collection, but these are mostly not really stories, more like extended vignettes, and except for their setting (Nevada desert) and general tone (pretty unhappy), they really don't resemble each other. It starts out with the fucking awesome "What to Do with the Dead," a story about a young dude who's job is delivering the ashes of the deceased back to the families. I never thought about a job like that, I imagine it's pretty weird, "Mrs... uh... Mrs Smith? I got your husband here." Weird.

There are stories about a long-distance ultra-marathoner who's an incredible dick, a dude who makes a living buying cheap medicine for families with members in nursing homes, usually on the way out, and he's asked by a client to buy him some drugs he knows he'll take to kill himself with, a dude who makes a living smuggling illegals from Mexico who finds a mysterious guy who wants to go back, a pretty funny story about a guy who's wife is cheating on him and he pulls these little pranks to get at her, but they keep backfiring, and there's always the specter of the dude he thinks she's fucking, Stephen, in the background.

Overall these stories are about broken people basically crumbling back into dust in the middle of BFE, sometimes funny, more often sad, sometimes actually touching.

I was also really happy to feel that the author has a deep-seated dislike of Elton John. Me too.