Barry Gifford’s Perdita Durango is a vicious little crime novel. Short, nasty and extremely alive. 

Perdita crosses paths with Romeo Dolorosa, a criminal, sometime drug-runner and self-styled practitioner of Santería, and the pair move through the borderlands of the United States and Mexico leaving kidnapping, murder and increasingly deranged acts of improvisation behind them.

It's written a la American underworld with a mixture of pulp speed and existential blankness. The book is funny, ugly and deliberately excessive, which is key to the work being less criminality than appetite. It's sex, danger, superstition, performance and all fuelled by the desire to become someone else. Characters speak in clipped exchanges and stories-within-stories; terrible events arrive with almost comic casualness. It belongs to the same scorched cultural landscape as Gifford’s Wild at Heart books, where road narrative, noir and grotesque Americana collapse into one another. 

Grove Press, New York, 1996. First Grove Press edition. Paperback. Light shelf wear and minor rubbing to covers and edges; faint surface marks visible. Pages clean and binding sound. Very good condition.