Kill Kill Faster Faster - Softcover

Kill Kill Faster Faster should be set to a pantherlike Lou Reed bass line: It's one of his songs come to life as a novel. It's very, very good and -- even more unbelievable for a Lower East Side novel --- IT'S REALLY HARD TO PUT DOWN! If the whole downtown sensibility seems to have become as dry and weightless as old newspaper lately, KILL KILL redeems it with a sorrowful beauty.

Joey One Way, Rose's narrator, is the new voice of downtown, one who knows how to sing in many of the old voices of that terrain -- ex-junkie, barrio literary hipster, mournful poet, jailhouse diarist, noir detective. Joey has just got out of jail for killing his beautiful black wife in a junkie fever 17 and a half years before and he's scared and jittery.

There are other characters -- Markie the producer who gets Joey released from prison to work on his TV projects, and Fleur, Markie's girlfriend, who is soon Joey's lover. I'd like to say the rolling paper-thin dimensions of both Markie and Fleur result from an addict's self-absorption, but the truth is Rose just isn't up to fleshing them out. His eye is on Joey.

As a result Kill Kill Faster Faster is pretty much a one-shot deal. There isn't much development -- our narrator's relationships to both Fleur and Markie are basically the same in the end as they are in the beginning. But Joey's entrancing rap fills up the book.

Joey spend it's 212 pages trying not to be driven crazy by (a) &@!! (specifically the lovely Fleur's; (b) memory; and (c) desire for some kind of salvation. The prose is colloquial but with a flourish: "And what am I angry about?" Joey thinks. "You know, I don't have a clue. Not a clue. Or I ain't talking. One or the other." It also has the drum-drum-drum rhythm of a drug craving. It gets in your blood.

Rose has been an Alphabet City literary fixture for years -- he cofounded the literary mag BETWEEN C&D (set to be relaunched this fall) and wrote a previous novel, the cult fave Kill the Poor. With Kill Kill Faster Faster, he emerges from the direction of Avenue D walking like the baddest white boy seen around here in years.

The editor emeritus of New York's Lower East Side (and the author of one previous novel, Kill the Poor, 1988) here tries to cash in on the post-Tarantino trend in nihilist/killer coolness for this tale of a Jack Henry Abbott sort--an ex-con who writes his way out of a life sentence only to end up back in the can on a bum rap. Joey One-Way, ``a walking aberration, a talking negotiation,'' serves over 17 years for killing his adulterous wife, who was ``light, bright, and almost white.'' As narrator of this supposedly transgressive narrative, Joey establishes his street credo early on, both with his ungrammatical ghetto dialect and his boast of tearing off a jail rapist's testicles. Joey's jailhouse masterpiece, ``White Man Black Hole,'' lands him a job ``juicing up'' scripts for a Miami Vice-like TV show set on Manhattan's mean streets, on which Joey is ostensibly an authority. Joey's pent-up aggression finds expression in a number of ways: He slashes a street punk in the face, he breaks a beer bottle over the head of a Maileresque writer at a cocktail party, and he enjoys lots of steamy sex with the wife of the man who arranged his release, the show's producer. Joey's so cool that he not only talks funny (``Joey smell death''), but he can't believe how lame all the upscale heroin users are in Manhattan (i.e., junkies ain't what they used to be). A stunning display of artsploitation, this self-styled shocker will probably suffer the fate of such books: Those who would be shocked aren't likely to read it. But if they do, they'll discover that the biggest con here is not Joey or his producer, but the novel itself. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.