Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Price You Pay [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Aidan Truhen.

The Price You Pay is entirely in the first person voice of Jack Price (pun intended and explicitly emphasized) and his immediate interlocutors, present tense, all internal monologue and external dialogue with not a quotation mark in sight, not even that em-dash alternative, and never a “he said.” Simple paragraph breaks and sparing direct address do all the heavy lifting of speaker identification, and they do it well.

Where plot is concerned, the book is a clear if remote descendant of John Buchan’s seminal “thriller” The Thirty-Nine Steps, although set in the 21st century with an elite coke dealer protagonist and a lot more collateral damage (also, no war propaganda). To the episodic man-on-the-run structure are added extra helpings of violence, plus the energy and ambivalent misanthropy of an early Chuck Pahluniuk novel.

“I am a fucking asymmetric criminal startup. I got limited expertise in criminal strategic warfare. I hotdesk and I outsource and I franchise but what I mostly have is a core concept, forward momentum and the unassailable fact that I’m crazier than a fibreglass hairball.” (73)

I don’t think this book has any socially redeeming value other than being twisted and funny as hell.