The Poker Club
by Ed Gorman
Leisure Books, 2000
The Poker Club, by Ed Gorman,
originally published as a limited and signed edition hardcover by Cemetery
Dance in 1999, is an expansion of Gorman’s sleek novella, “Out There in the
Darkness” published in 1995. It is the story of four poker buddies whose lives
go sideways when a burglar interrupts their weekly game. The men’s fear and
anger, heightened by a rash of burglaries and property crimes in their
middle-class neighborhood, boils over and the burglar finishes the night dead.
Instead of calling the police, the four friends dump the burglar’s body in a
river and try to move on, but then the late-night calls start, and the men find
themselves knocking on the doors of the criminal classes.
The Poker Club is a suspense novel propelled by the amplifying
effect of the primary characters’ fear-based decisions. These decisions—we’ll
call the police after we’ve scared the burglar, no one will ever know he was
here—isolate the men, in quick succession, from their families, their
neighborhood, and ultimately, from each other. The plotting is straight-forward
and without any real surprises, which is okay because the novel’s power is
emotion. The men are pushed into decisions (and actions) most middle-class men
never see. They face the prospect of losing their reputations, their
professions—and with this, the loss of their lifestyles—their families, and,
perhaps, their lives. It is more psychological and character-driven than action
and it works well.
The Poker Club is dedicated, in
part, to Richard Matheson and it is a good fit. The way suburban middle-class
America is transformed from a comfortable and safe place to something less
friendly, almost nefarious, is similar to Matheson’s brilliant novel, Stir
of Echoes. The Poker Club was translated into a tolerable
low-budget film directed by Tim McCann and starring Johnathon Schaech.
Click here for
the Kindle edition and here for the paperback at Amazon.
No comments:
Post a Comment