Bangkok pulp writer James Newman has hammered out another shot-from-the-hip fast-as-they-come thriller, featuring recovering alcoholic and PI Joe Dylan drifting through the Zone, a sly reference to William Burrough’s Interzone – a place where all races lead to the bottom, all smiles are false and everyone is out to kill everyone else for a few bucks. Like Burroughs, Newman both despises and admires the darkness he has witnessed and he manages to harvest a modicum of tragedy in his newest story.
Joe Dylan gets involved with a bar girl who turns up dead soon after. As he begins to investigate her suspicious suicide, he soon slips into a criminal web of fetish sex, human sacrifice and black magic and turns from the hunter to the hunted, with blow dart-shooting killers of uncertain gender on his trail. Even dwarves and the Ramayana provide cameos.
In fact, all the standard ghouls of the Bangkok night make an appearance, from psychotic ladyboys to flesh-eating monitor lizards. The writing is more fluid and assured than in Newman’s other novel, Bangkok Express, and Dylan’s journey through a world so rancid that the grime almost oozes through the screen – if one were to read the e-book edition of Red Night Zone – never falters. The circumstances of this particularly tragic reality are well explored, occasionally too deeply.
The heart of Newman’s literary mission – the crossing of Beat-style writing and observations of Thailand’s turgid world of sexpats – is not as obvious a concept as it may sound. The seedy Thai underworld is easy to describe and difficult to bring to life. Exuberant gaudiness and total degradation, detachment and vast suffering are opposites intrinsic to the Bangkok reality yet difficult to convey without either descending into tabloid journalism styles or out-and-out sleaze. Newman, by looking back to the Beats and the mass paperback culture of the ’40s and ’50s, is just far enough away from depravity to sail his ship. For the most part his observations on the monstrous are spot on, though his notion that the foreign Johns are the greater victims in the sordid death-sex-life dance that moves along the streets of downtown Bangkok will not be palatable to all readers. One presumes that Newman doesn’t care. The course is charted, there’s wind in the sails and Joe Dylan is likely to revisit the Zone somewhere near you soon. He will just slip into a barstool and turn his head and the chapter will start something like this: ‘The Nazi bargirl lit a cigarette and asked for a drink.’
Of course she did.
Red Night Zone, by James Newman, is available for Kindle now on Amazon.co.uk priced $4.95.