Publishers Weekly
02/16/2015
Set in South Central Los Angeles in 1992, during the six days of rioting sparked by the Rodney King verdict, this violent, visceral novel from Gattis (Kung Fu High School) chronicles the intersecting lives of a diverse cast of characters caught up in the chaos, from business owners and nurses to drug dealers and gang members, the last of whom use the anarchy as an opportunity to take vengeance on those who have done them wrong. The narrative is replete with disturbing imagery—like a firefighter getting his face crushed by a cinder block—but the emotionally detached tone lessens the impact. In the end, this isn’t a story about the events of the L.A. riots or even the people involved—it’s about the city and its ability to rise from the ashes and re-create itself into “something broken and pretty and new.” Like the historical events it’s based on, this page-turner is horrific, heartrending, and—maybe—just a bit hopeful. Agent: Simon Lipskar, Writers House. (Apr.)
Interview Magazine
It’s a propulsive, sun-baked, blood-soaked read that captures one of the most turbulent times in recent Los Angeles history. It’s all the more remarkable an achievement considering Gattis...was barely in high school, in Colorado, at the time three LAPD officers who assaulted King were acquitted.
Dennis Lehane
All Involved is a monumental achievement. Ryan Gattis takes the reader into the broken, outraged heart of Los Angeles during the ‘92 riots and doesn’t blink once at what he finds there.
Joyce Carol Oates
Corrosive, timely, vividly realized scenes of urban warfare and thwarted dreams by a writer who clearly knows his subject: the netherworld of Los Angeles in the early 1990’s.
Paula Hawkins
A heartbreaking portrait of a city tearing itself apart.
David Mitchell
ALL INVOLVED is a symphonic, pitch-perfect, superlative novel. It is visceral and adrenalin-fuelled, yet tender and even darkly comic. It is audacious, unflinching and subversive. It doesn’t judge. It swallowed me whole.
Library Journal
02/15/2015
For six days during the spring of 1992, the city of Los Angeles erupted in a volcano of violence following the Rodney King verdicts. Officially, the riots killed 53 people and caused $1 billion worth of property damage. Gattis's explosive work of "sourced fiction" identifies more casualties: the gang members who used the nonexistent police and media presence in parts of the city to engage in their own tempest of unchecked violence. Opening with the grisly murder of a civilian taco stand employee whose siblings have gang ties, the novel circles out to cover the motivations and paybacks of rival gangbangers, in their own voices and in real time, as well as the perspectives of those trying to help, including a nurse and firefighter eyeing each other from afar. The author's ear for dialog and the street vernacular of the time—the novel comes with a multipage glossary—is finely tuned and captures the anarchic nature of the civic catastrophe enveloping the City of Angels. VERDICT An overwhelming and fully immersive performance from Gattis (Kung Fu High School), who finds the humanity and poetry in the most inhumane of circumstances. A solid addition to all fiction collections, though not for the fainthearted. [See Prepub Alert, 10/20/14.]—Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ
Kirkus Reviews
2015-01-29
A novel of Los Angeles tormented by racial tension and gang violence in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict.Readers who were alive and aware then will remember the news footage from Southern California when, on April 29, 1992, a jury acquitted two police officers of using excessive force—though clearly King, an African-American, had been beaten. Novelist and street artist Gattis (Kung Fu High School, 2005, etc.) takes the rising post-verdict mayhem as backdrop for a series of linked, episodic stories in which Chicano gangsters, Anglo emergency responders, Korean vigilantes and members of just about every other ethnic group in melting-pot LA share the stage. As the book opens, a young food server remarks that he and a fellow worker, arriving at a catering site, "saw smoke, four black towers going up like burning oil wells in Kuwait. Maybe not that big, but big." The violence soon sweeps young Ernesto up, as it does his co-worker, who bears, among other sobriquets, the resonant nom de guerre Termite. The latter lad aspires to something better, and he can be downright philosophical: "All of us are just some fucked-up little smart kids born in the wrong places….I mean, we're not all smart. Some of us are just fucked-up or drugged out, but we do get fixated on shit." Check. Gattis does a good job of rounding out and differentiating the 17 or so major players who figure in his pages, some phony confident and some Hamlet-like in their uncertainty ("we are technically vigilantes, and I don't know how I feel about that"), and there are lashings of pyrotechnic violence and flowing adrenalin to keep the story moving. Still, the reader will be forgiven for wondering what the point might be, other than that life is unfair, confusing and often ugly—and for that, we have the film Magnolia. Competent but not especially memorable.
