Blood Sugar by Daniel Kraus

(2019)

From the dark imagination of bestselling novelist Daniel Kraus - co-author with Guillermo del Toro of The Shape of Water - comes a Halloween crime story that's like nothing you've ever read before.

In a ruined house at the end of Yellow Street, an angry outcast hatches a scheme to take revenge for all the wrongs he has suffered. With the help of three alienated kids, he plans to hide razor blades, poison, and broken glass in Halloween candy, maiming or killing dozens of innocent children. But as the clock ticks closer to sundown, will one of his helpers - an innocent himself, in his own streetwise way - carry out or defeat the plan?

Told from the child's POV, in a voice as unforgettable as A Clockwork Orange, Kraus' novel is at once frightening an emotional, thought-provoking and laugh-out-loud funny. It'll make you rethink your concepts of family, loyalty, and justice - and will leave you double-checking the wrappers on your Halloween candy for the rest of your days. 

So says the back cover.

I made it to pg. 53 and this paragraph:

"I find Midge over by the cherry cough drops and lecture her how Barack Obama used to be the chief mightyducker of the whole US of A not to mention the stone cold robocop that killed the dude that did the twin towers. Little sister gets confused cuz usually Im (sic) lecturing her about the Two Towers from Lord of the Rings and now she probably thinks Barack Obama killed Sauron. Politics are mad complex."

Folks, I can't read a whole book like this. Life is too short. I was sick of this by pg. 2. The back cover references A Clockwork Orange, but it just didn't hit me that way. I wish it did. The last time I read that (1992) I really loved it. But I've never been able to read any other Burgess, despite an enduring (still) interest in the man's work and perspectives. I don't know if there's a connection.

Take a look at these reviews on Goodreads. Holy moley do people love this book. And it sounds like there's some dark, disturbing stuff going on that I didn't get to. I'm all for unconventional structure and narrators and dark, disturbing stuff, but the veneer of this one, with the cutesy blackface (kinda) narration and the overstacked deck, and it just pushed me away.

Kudos, sir, you apparently landed - and hard - with everyone but me. 

This one was two hundred twenty pages, so I gave it a little more than twenty percent of its total before punting. I wish I enjoyed it more - I think the author skillfully switched between voices, it's just I didn't want to read any of them. The fake letters written by Jody strewn throughout were the best parts. (I kinda flipped and skimmed after pg. 53 and read long stretches.) 

"Believe, yo."

~

The Hard Case Crime Chronicles will continue 

with Killing Castro by Lawrence Block,

appearing sooner or later.