Four Corners: A Novel

by Wally Rudolph

Overview

Four Corners is a bare-knuckled debut novel about life, love, and violence along four states of the American southwest -- both a savage, mean-streets thriller and a heartbreaking story of unfortunate love. For the better part of thirty-seven years, Frank Bruce has hobbled through life, dragging his hunger for amphetamines, alcohol, and crime behind him like a heap of tarnished weight. Now, emboldened by the love of his child-fiancé Maddie Nicole, Frank goes on the run through the drug underworld of the Southwest trying to save a young boy from his meth-riddled father and casino mogul grandfather. Caught in a cat-and-mouse chase but still determined to protect what he loves, Frank seeks help from his onetime mentor, legendary drug kingpin Jon Santer. But in doing so, Frank triggers a vile reckoning with his terrible, violent past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619022973
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	06/10/2014
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Wally Rudolph, born in Canada to Jamaican parents, had a fifteen-year affair with illicit drugs that had him drop out of college and took him back and forth across the American Midwest. His fiction can be found in the literary journals Milk Money, Lines+Stars, Palooka, Slush Pile, The Brooklyner, and the anthology, Literary: Pasadena. A graduate of The Second City Conservatory in Chicago, he now resides with his family in Los Angeles. As an actor, he has appeared in numerous films and TV shows including Street Kings, Bang Bang, and Sons of Anarchy. Rudolph is also the author of Four Corners.

Read an Excerpt

Maddie's eyes opened as we crossed Pueblo, Colorado's southern limit – forty miles from her folks' place in Cañon City.
'I took the liberty,' I said. 'I figured we should break the news proper to your family.'
She wiped the sleep from her face, not even surprised we were on the highway, and put her small hand over mine on the steering wheel.
'My mother's not going to believe her little girl is engaged.’
It was late in the morning of New Year's Eve 1999, and Maddie said her parents were just like us. I didn't see it, and in another hour, when they finally put their eyes on me, neither did they. While Maddie spooned instant coffee into four boiling mugs, her folks stared at me in silence. Her father was a long time coward – one of them tall balding numbers, older than his wife with big hands and uncomfortable with his own size. He whispered into his little wife's ear instead of speaking to me straight and when she opened up her arms to embrace me, this substantial man shot me a look of womanly envy and hate. Maddie's mother smiled and smiled till she took all of me in, and then she got quiet and didn't know what to do with her face. She followed me around their sitting room, tapping at her perm and straightening her jeans. I didn’t let down. I groped all their favorite holiday decorations down to an ancient portrait of Father Christmas, his tiny glasses barely curbing his bloated greedy nose.
They asked me how we met, and why I loved their daughter. Why me, Francis Bruce, the declining ox with a rough cough and red eyes? A thirty-five-year-old land surveyor who made no airs, predictions or promises for Maddie's future. I didn't tell them the truth. I was thirty-seven, and Maddie had worked up the bit about the land surveyor. I told them Maddie clippered my early gray hair short at a cheap haircut spot in a strip mall, and I fell in love. I didn't mention when she was drunk or high their little daughter seemed lost but turned hungry for sex. I didn't say we met a year prior in a dirty hippie den outside Española – how we drank vodka and sucked on tangerines, and how we held our breath till the liquor and drugs betrayed us, flushing our faces red then pink – I didn't say any of it. And her mother thought the haircut yarn was straight till her husband whispered into her ear something wise.
Her face went white, and she took Maddie upstairs by the arm. I stood alone in the kitchen with her old man. He looked at the ground, and I don't know if he thought I was laughing – because I was coughing. But he looked up at me, pulled his thin red lips back and told me to get the fuck out of his house. I didn't fight and walked out making sure not to touch a thing. I waited in the truck for Maddie to come storming out, crying all over her face. She was huffing and puffing and then three steps from the car door, she bent over and got sick all over the sidewalk. She didn't stop though. She just finished up, spit, and slammed the truck door hard when she got in. Her father stood at the window shaking his head back and forth. He turned his head to the side and said something over his shoulder. I lifted my hand to him and, but he didn't move. He just sipped at his coffee and closed the drapes slow, not wanting to be the first one to turn away.

Editorial Reviews

"Rudolph means to stress that hard-luck people can be as hard to quit as hard drugs, and the tone the author gives Frank is appealingly flinty and worn...The strength of Frank's voice compensates for the flaws, though, recalling down-and-out tales like Don Carpenter's Hard Rain Falling or Daniel Woodrell's Give Us a Kiss." --Kirkus

..."the plot is rendered in vivid, punch-drunk prose, colored by the cold, jaundiced sunlight of late December in the high desert, a land so imbued with harshness that even its snowflakes prick the flesh." --LA Weekly

"Wally Rudolph's meth-and-cocaine-addled protagonists reel through a nonstop catastrophe of violence, flight, and revenge, too self-destructive to have anything more than a prayer--but they are real. They suffer and love and worship, however crazily. The action is urgent and compelling, the details are as crisp as the light that falls on Santa Fe. Wally knows the territory. And the territory is the human heart." --Jack Butler, Pulitzer Prize Nominee for Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock

"Four Corners is a book that will stay with me for a long time, an outstanding first novel by a writer unafraid to scrape the crud off the floor of the human psyche. The best kind of crime fiction." --Scott Phillips, author of The Ice Harvest and Hop Alley

From the Publisher

2014-05-07
A meth addict itching to go straight gets sidetracked in the Southwest in this tough-talking debut.When we first meet Frank, the narrator of Rudolph's first novel, he's carrying a steamer trunk's worth of baggage. He's a middle-aged man making a good faith effort to quit speed, but his young girlfriend, Maddie, is still using. Frank is trying to help Maddie as well as his junkie friend Ben, who wants to run from Colorado to Mexico with his son, Sean. But when Ben is separated from the group, Frank is left with even more baggage, as well as the wrath of Ben's father, a casino mogul with underworld connections. In other words, Rudolph means to stress that hard-luck people can be as hard to quit as hard drugs, and the tone the author gives Frank is appealingly flinty and worn. ("Something scratched at my heart like fishhooks on a tin can.") As the title suggests, Frank drives through four Southwest desert states over the course of the novel, but the strongest scenes are the ones in which he's forced to stay put in a Phoenix jail, where he suffers a stroke; his flashbacks to his past as a dealer and user, along with his interactions with nurses and guards, put some fresh air into the story, allowing Rudolph to write about consequences and addiction without greeting-card sanctimony. The novel is structured like a thriller, but Rudolph makes a few rookie errors: Frank is carefully rendered, but the side characters are thinner, the web of interactions becomes overly convoluted, and the gunplay in the closing chapters feels stock. The strength of Frank's voice compensates for the flaws, though, recalling down-and-out tales like Don Carpenter's Hard Rain Falling or Daniel Woodrell's Give Us a Kiss.A familiar noirish plot enlivened by its no-nonsense, rough-living narrator.

Kirkus Reviews