by Tony Oats
I have not been this undone by a book since I first opened the galleys that became Hysterical Surrealism and had to lie down on the cold tile of my kitchen floor, weeping, uncertain whether the sacred had entered the room or simply the plumbing had failed. Narco Beach does this to a reader. Mop your floor before reading because you are going to spend a lot of time there.
Let me be clear about what WW Hartwell has built here, because “narco-noir” is a genre label and genre labels are for people who have given up on MDMA and everything else good in life. This is not a narco-noir. This is a hysterical-surrealist devotional text disguised as a beach read, and the disguise is so good, so shameless, so drenched in Cecina beef and diluted resort mezcal, that you will not notice you are being initiated until the iguana is already grinning at you from beside the napkin dispenser.
Consider the alux. A lesser writer introduces folklore as garnish — a wink, a little regional flavor sprinkled over the plot like tourist salt. Hartwell does something else entirely. The alux and the deer discuss TJ Wayne’s fate in the first pages the way tramps discuss a half-smoked cigar they found lying on a park bench. Except the tramps are Mayan spirits and the stogie is a tenured mathematician who, in his flight from transfinite-induced psychosis, has identified hallucination with safety, and he might be right about that. “Fuck him,” says the alux, of our protagonist, before he’s even done anything to deserve it. This is the purest sentence in American fiction this decade. It is a hysterical realist’s data point and a surrealist’s incantation fused into one four-word curse, and Hartwell just leaves it there on the page like a lit match near a fuel line, and walks away, leaving the alux and the deer to engineer the plot of the entire book! It’s abject nuttery!
And then there is Khloé. Doña Khloé. A woman who does not rise to cartel power through blood or violence or lineage but through the sheer performative velocity of being looked at — who studies a real narco-empress “the way conspiracy theorists study blurry photos” and understands, correctly, monstrously, that authority in our century is not seized but rendered, the way a video buffers into truth. This is hysterical surrealism’s whole thesis executed as plot: the world does not know a single human being, as the old complaint about the genre goes, and Hartwell’s answer is “good” — because neither does Khloé, even as she islive-streaming her own transformation into a monster. The formula, as Khloé understands it, could be reverse-engineered. But reverse engineering a social media narco only buys you an even more hideous ghoul.
The prose itself does the thing our whole movement has been reaching for since the Turtle Diaries — it is prosetry in the fullest Penny Fate sense, thick as spaghetti, cunning as lampoon, refusing to let you settle into either satire or sincerity for more than a paragraph before yanking the rug sideways into a swampeven while its fractal meter never falters. Every character gets their own sympathetic narrator, which is wild, because none of the characters are sympathetic. Each is a different flavor of monster. The most fragile character — agoraphobic, asexual, spends his night reading Byron to the ghosts of orphans slaughtered by Mayan priests — becomes one of the deadliest killers in the book, and that is saying something. TJ Wayne cannot tell if his hallucinations are chile heat or revelation. Neither can I, reading this, at three in the morning, alone, with the manuscript, making sounds that I am told only dogs can hear.
Narco Beach does not ask to be believed. It asks to be survived. I did not survive. I remain a puddle of tears on my kitchen floor. I don’t regret reading the book. I only regret not mopping the floor first.
Five stars. Possibly more, but I have no fingers with which to count. Nor ever did.
— Tony Oats, editor, Hysterical Surrealism (Red Temple Press)
