A Killer's Kiss- Hal Ellson

 He pressed down on the gas. Night covered the desert in immense darkness. Thankful for its protection, he still didn't feel safe. Someone was following him, and he drove faster till the car began to shake. The feeling remained. Whoever was in back of him was gaining ground. No lights showed on the road behind, but that didn't matter.

 He pressed harder on the gas, and the whole structure of the car responded with a violent shudder. Behind him in the dimensionless blackness, the other car roared nearer. And then it happened. He couldn't say how. More, he was aware that the idea was completely irrational and unacceptable, but it stuck. He had no means of shaking, disassembling it.

 Behind him, a dim image formed, a face with nebulous features. By some trick, the one who had been following him had gotten to the car, was sitting in back of him now, and waiting for him to turn. But he would not turn. Suddenly, he knew why. That was the object of the one behind him, to divert his attention from the road.

 A split second of negligence, and he'd be off of it, and mangled in the wreckage of the car. "He wants me to die," Luis told himself.

Written review below. Video review here:

 Today, I'm going to discuss a very odd noir, something that I was not, not expecting, and it is A Killer's Kiss by Hal Ellson. This was a Valentine's Day present from my wife. Get it? It's romantic. So, as you can see, it looks like a femme fatale noir. I'm going to read off the blurb here because I just wanted to show you that that's how it's marketed, and it's not what it is.

  “A woman's voice in the next room calling his name softly. A note slipped underneath the door. This was Luis' introduction to Francine. She was beautiful, lonely, and she wanted one night of fun in the little town with no questions asked."

 "Downstairs in the lobby, waiting, was the detective.

  “Luis knew that the escape he had planned so carefully in prison had reached a dead end. Still, one prison dream was now within his grasp. He opened the door to Francine's room."

 Killer's Kiss is a paperback original, originally published by Hillman Books in 1959, and I could not figure out who that cover artist is. I looked and I looked. If anyone out there knows put it in the comments because that artist should get credit; it is one hell of a beautiful cover. I would pick that up in a second if I saw it in the store.

 The author, Hal Ellison, was an American author, and he is 100% not Harlan Ellison.

 I, like many other people, many comments that I saw online, just assumed that it was a kind of working pseudonym of Harlan Ellison, and it is not. And interestingly enough, Harlan Ellison credits Hal Ellison as the inspiration for writing his very first novel, Web of the City. So, our author here, Hal Ellison, worked at Bellevue Hospital, Manhattan, New York City as a nurse's aide.

 He also spent time as a social worker and a recreational therapist. He worked with lots of misguided youth. He took their their tales of woe, their ne’er-do-well shenanigans, and he penned many juvenile delinquent novels. In fact, he is claimed to be one of the best to ever do it.

 And though Killer's Kiss is my first Hal Ellison penned book, I would surmise that those juvenile delinquent books have a very realistic and sympathetic viewpoint of the kids, and not the usual kind of exploitation of that genre, as A Killer's Kiss really explores the humanity of the “bad guy.”

 So, our protagonist, I guess, or the focus of the story here is Luis Santiago. He's on a bus. He was recently released from prison, and he just stabbed some guy a couple pages before the story starts. He's taking the bus to go to his brother's house. We are somewhere in Mexico.

 He gets to his brother's house. Luis' brother is not happy to see him. We hear a woman call from back in the house, "Jesus, who's there?"

 Jesus replies, "No one."

 Luis is gutted here.

 "That's who I am to you? I'm no one?" No one. To my family. His brother asks him why he needs the money, and Luis states that he wants to go to the US border. He hands him enough money for the bus and tells him to never come back. Back in town, Luis realizes that he is absolutely alone in the world.

 He was desperate before, but now it's almost as if he doesn't care what happens to him. He goes to a bar. He's paranoid. "Is that man staring at me?" Another man bumps into him. It's a man wearing a cowboy hat, and his eyes are drunk and blurry. He's friendly, though, or maybe he's just pretending to be friendly to gain Luis's trust.

 Right away, we see the inner workings of Luis's mind. He's constantly looking over his shoulder, seeing enemies in strangers' faces. He knows the police are after him. He wants to run, and he's in the process of running, but he also meanders. In his mind is the battle between giving into his inevitable fate and his will to survive.

 The man in the cowboy hat invites Luis to come join him and his friends, and Luis is sure that this will end in a lynching, but he has no one. He is nothing. He starts to walk out the door with the man and his friends, resigned to his fate, and the man simply turns around and states, "They won't let us gamble in here."

 A dozen men pile into the cars. At first, they're boisterous and drunk. They drive and drive. They drive out to the middle of nowhere, and all of a sudden, the further they get out of town, the less they start talking. Luis starts getting it into his mind these people are out to get him.

 They're going to take him out in the middle of nowhere, shoot him in the head. The scene is written beautifully. Ellson has us out in the endless night of the desert, the pitch blackness. Luis's character is very high-strung. He's very nervous. He doesn't seem to mind so much that he's already killed a man, but the stress of him getting caught for it overwhelms him.

 You feel at any moment that the smallest thing could set him off. He's on the sharp edge of a razor blade, slowly sliding to his ultimate demise. They arrive at the house. Everyone gets out. He's sitting in the car. Finally, the guys come up to him like, "What are you doing?"

 They go inside the house. They start gambling. Everyone's drinking, having a good time. Luis is winning and losing. In the final bet with the man with the cowboy hat, he pushes it all in for the final bet and Luis doesn't want to look weak in front of all these other guys, so he pushes it all in also.

 He loses. And the guy with the cowboy hat who's been so friendly to him the whole time is still just like, "Hey man, you win some, you lose some. But why don't you come back next time? Hey, maybe you'll win next time." The man gets up, goes out to the desert to take a leak. Luis follows him.

 You know he's going to kill him to get that money. He goes out there, and the man begs for his life. And you see the first moment where Luis is human. There are lots of comments in this book about what makes a killer, what makes people do what they do. Are they born this way? Or is it something that happened to them?

 The character of Luis is very complex. Here is this man who's been friendly to him the whole night, and you think he's just going to get it. But Luis spares his life. He does rob him though, so he's got all this money now. Then Luis just walks out into the desert. He knows that there is this mountain that he can go hide out in.

 And this is where it starts getting kind of weird. I mean, the desert at night scenes were kind of surreal, and being in Luis' head and the paranoia and just everywhere you go, everyone is looking at you. Are they watching you? While he's up in the mountain, he's in his cave hideout, he looks down, and it looks like there's a man down there in the middle of the night just staring up at him. He's already paranoid, but he's like, "All right, whatever, I'm just gonna go to sleep."

 He has nightmares of scorpions crawling all over his body, and they relate the scorpion to a creature just doing what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to be metaphoric, I believe. He wakes from this dream and looks straight forward to the entrance to the cave, and there's light out there now, and he can see that there's a shadow of a man standing at the entrance of the cave beckoning him.

 He panics, jumps up, and runs further on down inside the cave. He gets lost has this mental breakdown, and then finally finds his way back out. Down in the ravine is the wagon, and there's the man that he thinks saw last night. Or was it? Is this the same man who was standing outside of the cave?

 He offers the old man money for a ride into town on his wagon, and the old man just simply states that the ride is free. This part of the book and the way that these little scenarios happen, it reminded me of a very dark version of the Oh Brother, Where Art Thou movie.

 I know there's probably other examples, but that's just the first thing that came to mind. Where he meets these people, they're kind of off, and he has spiritual and philosophical encounters with them. So, we get this really surreal chapter of this old man taking him to his home where they meet up with his grandson, and neither say much of anything.

 The silence of the old man and the grandson makes an already secluded area feel even more empty. The boy takes him to a hotel that's really close. Now we're back in society though still remote. The hotel owner is not thrilled to see Luis show up with no bags and no car. Luis goes upstairs. The room is pitch black.

 He tries to sleep, but it makes him feel like he's back in prison. He dreams of footsteps outside of his door, the guard walking down the hallway, and then all of a sudden there's gunshots outside. He thinks it's part of the dream when he wakes up, but no, there's actually someone shooting off a gun outside.

 The hotel is isolated, but there is a tourist couple, an American tourist couple there, who basically just get annihilated down at the bar all night long. One night, Luis goes down to the bar, and the man is already passed out. He strikes up a conversation with the woman, and they end up going up to his room.

 But in the midst of getting it on he stops two minutes in and gets up. He's just not feeling it. He's a very detached human being. He looks down and sees she has passed out. He goes through her purse, grabs the keys, goes and steals her car, and drives out to the mountain.

 We get this very surreal highway trip. He thinks that someone is following him. He imagines someone in the back seat. It's very Twilight Zone. It's very David Lynch. He wrecks the car, and he starts walking towards the mountain.

 I don't want to tell you the whole book because that's no fun so hopefully that sells you on it. It does get even more weird. The next part is one of the weirder ones, where he is out in the desert and he finds this drinking hole. And he looks up, and there's a woman standing up in the rocks, but she's not moving. And then all of a sudden, there's a man who comes up to get water.

 Luis looks up, and he sees that the woman has moved. The man comments that it's a statue called The Lady of the Cave. And Luis says, "It can't be a statue. I just saw her move." And the man's like, "Yeah, she does that sometimes, and she also smiles at you." Then the man starts walking off into the desert, and Luis doesn't know what to do, so he just starts following.

 These scenarios are very minimal in dialogue. Luis is very paranoid and very conflicted on what to do with these situations. You don't know when he's going to kill one of these people or when he's just going to walk off.

 The climax happens at a new hotel. This one is in a small village. There is a man that Luis thinks is a police officer who's out to get him. There's a woman in this, but he doesn’t care about her whatsoever. She's not a femme fatale. She also has a very complex, depressing story going on. She's an American woman on vacation in Mexico.

 It gets very dreamlike where even Luis questions if any of this has really been happening. Heads up, it's not a dream, I'll just put that out there because if it was I would tell you because it-was-all-a-dream scenarios are the biggest rip off in storytelling.

 So, it's definitely real, but Luis wonders if he's dreaming. There are these psychological cat and mouse kind of conversations with him and the man that he thinks is a cop, and we also get perspective from this man. We get lots of philosophical musings on what it is that makes killers kill, what it is that makes people who they are, and then they relate it to how the scorpion is a killer, but it's just its natural instinct.

 When I was reading this, I was like, you know what this reminds me of? It's like The Stranger, by Albert Camus but for working class people. It's very noir in style. It could almost be an old 50s black and white movie but one of the rare and off the beaten path movies.

 It has so much feeling in it that is very unreality. I think if you like stuff like Lost Highway or any David Lynch really or if you’ve ever seen Daughter of Horror, it’s like that.

 It's smart. It's psychological and makes you question as to why people actually do the things that they do and if there's any control in it. So, I say yes, go check this out. They're available online for not too much. They're like $12 to $20. And now I'm really looking forward to reading one of his juvenile delinquent books.