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Anthony Neil Smith
Psychosomatic
(Point Blank)

There’s blood on every page. Unlike Hollywood’s take on crime, there is an underlying sense of reality. Maybe it’s the chubby protagonist playing a wise-guy. Maybe it’s the wheelchair-bound vixen without arm’s or legs. The character’s personalities prove more engaging than a jacked Schwarzenegger posing as a middle class banker pushed to the edge. And, perhaps, this rationalizes the violence that ensues as being more than shock value. Beneath the gore of Psychosomatic is a writer whose display of violence could be a ticker-tape of the absurdity that is the five o’clock news.

Eric Obenauf