Writers Read: Jo Perry

Jo Perry earned a Ph.D. in English, taught college literature and writing, produced and wrote episodic television, and has published articles, book reviews, and poetry. In 2019, Perry was the first female writer invited to speak at the venerable Men of Mystery Event. Her short story, "The Kick The Bucket Tour" made the Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2018 list in The Best Mystery Stories.

Perry lives in Los Angeles with her husband, novelist Thomas Perry.

Her new novel is The World Entire.

Recently I asked Perry about what she was reading. Her reply:

These are a few of the books I’m reading, all from independent publishers–U.K.’s Head Shot and Fahrenheit Press and Run Amok Crime in the U.S.

Matt Phillips’s latest, A Good Rush of Blood (Run Amok Crime) delineates delicate, complicated and sharp-edged persons and places in a stark, sexy thriller about family estrangement and liberation, trust and betrayal, and the search for the mirage we call freedom in a world as unnourishing and beautiful as the desert Phillips conjures to life. It’s no surprise that AGROB is a 2024 Thriller Award finalist. Phillips also has an excellent podcast, Roughneck Dispatch.
…Creeley managed to punch the address into her map app while she kept her eyes on the big rig in front of her. She had forty-five minutes to go and as she tossed the phone aside, she saw the looming fingers of the turbines up ahead. Their frames were illuminated by the blinking red signal lights along their top––momentary warnings for helicopters. Like eyes in the night. The sight took her back to the night she hopped the train west and rode it until it headed north. She remembered sliding through a dark sandy night, past the looming San Jacinto peak. She saw the mountain now, a jagged pyramid reaching so high that she couldn’t see the peak from her drivers’ seat. She remembered watching the mountain recede and, after a long time, vanish…
According to Mark by H.B. O’Neill (Fahrenheit Press) is an anatomy of Robert-ness. Disoriented and dissolving after a shattering break-up, Robert guides the reader through his life as Mark Twain guides him–– via signs and whispers––through his.

According to Mark demonstrates that consciousness is both liberation and captivity, and that humanness under pressure and the identity-squeeze of isolation and brokenness terrorize and exhilarate. Robert’s precision-calibrated, mood-shifting, rising and plunging narrative proves that nothing is more insistent, convincing, or powerful than the dazzling darkness that is our fearful awareness of ourselves.
And now Mark Twain is whispering in my ear.

And he’s reminding me of what he’s told me numerous times before, what he’s been telling me almost every day since the day that Rebecca told me that she. . .with him...

And Mark Twain’s argument is powerful, convincing and insistent tonight.

“Suicide is the only sane thing the young or old ever do in this life.”
Hacker (Fahrenheit Press) is the third in Duncan MacMaster’s inventive mystery series, which––though it exhibits a dearth of “elite ninja killers” ––has an irresistible hero, Jake Mooney––a courageous, semi-pudgy finally-successful hack writer whose slyness––like his creator’s––is born of brilliance.

Hacker is fast, inventive and seriously funny. Mooney sometimes feels “weirdly fictional like [he] only [lives] on the pages of some other hack” while he is a visiting lecturer on a quiet, idyllic private college campus where shit happens and then keeps happening: A spectacular murder-by-arrow that lofts the victim’s eyeball into Jake’s until-then- garnish-free Coke, a to-the-death-wrestling match inside a moribund water park’s frozen water slide, audacious cons, arsons, and the bombing of a bakery owned by a beloved Black family. Mooney–bruised, tired, and often “running for [his] life and [from] blood loss” –is ready for anyone and anything not because he has a method or a schtick–but because he’s observant, practical, improvisational, is allergic to bullshit and is “always grateful for a sandwich.” MacMaster’s delicious take-down of “elite” colleges includes one of the best explanations of what makes writing good I’ve ever read.

A Punch To The Heart, a collection of Andrew Humphrey’s short crime fiction (Head Shot Press) gets my heart going. I’ve just begun reading and my reaction is Wow. Humphrey’s prose is sure, unforgiving, and supernaturally lean, and the stories are machines for unmasking the Immutable Catastrophic Thing–in us or in someone else–perhaps six small words–that transform a life-story into a crime-story:

From “Anyway”:
‘Affairs? No. Not on my part.’ Not for want of trying, I think. And Julie, he says.

I falter and he sits up straight, pushing the pad to one side.

Take your time, Phillip.

‘Yes, Julie did . . . see someone else for a while.’ Six words. Jesus.

I’ll need the details. Names. Dates.

May as well run a blade across my balls, I think, but I smile and speak some words in a certain order. Each word a nail, each sentence a hammer. ‘But we’re fine now,’ I say eventually. ‘Water under the bridge and all that.’

He stops writing and looks at me…
And from “Bad Milk”:

“I go for a walk in the grounds before anyone else can collar me. It’s early evening and the light is draining from a clear sky. It’s spring. The air is soft and warm. It’s been a good day to bury one’s only brother.”