Christal
Cooper
CS DeWILDT’S
LOVE
YOU TO A PULP
The
Severed Ear In The Lawn
Love
You to a Pulp by CS DeWildt is one
strange trip through the Kentucky countryside with a glue-sniffing,
skull-cracking, squirrel-hunting private detective by the name of Neil
Chambers. When Chambers is approached by a father (Mr. Jenkins the
pharmacist) who wants his grown daughter (Helen Jenkins) away from the lowlife (Hoon)
she's shacking up with, he takes the skeptic's view of the case. But he has no
idea the chaotic fever dream that he's about to stumble into. Vicious rednecks,
more vicious rich people, crooked sheriffs-Neil will fight them all. This isn't
a case. It's survival.
On February 15, 2015 All Due Respect
Books published Love You To A Pulp, the fourth book by CS DeWildt:
CS DeWIldt’s other books include: Candy And Cigarettes by Vagabondage
Press. http://www.vagabondpressbooks.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=3&products_id=36&zenid=afd2347a80731af336749815e66eb009
Dead
Animals by
Martian Lit
The
Louisville Problem by Bartleby Snopes Press
CS DeWildt, 37, described his childhood
in Grand Rapids, Michigan similar to Love You To A Pulp’s Neil Chambers
in Brownsville, Kentucky in one way:
both were shy boys living in a sitcom.
“I
was a nervous, shy kid, with a gift for cracking jokes and faking confidence.
It (my childhood) was sometimes
like growing up in a sitcom David Lynch would produce for Nickelodeon: seemingly innocuous, safe, but if you looked
closely, you might just find a severed ear on the lawn.”
DeWildt’s severed ear in his lawn was his
imagination – which eventually created the crime noir novel Love
You To A Pulp, where protagonist Neil Chambers is a lonely man who
suffers from a broken heart over his first love Rinthy, and is on the most
dangerous assignment he’s ever encountered as a private investigator.
DeWildt always had a creative, powerful,
and compelling imagination and knew he wanted to be a writer by age six.
“I
was in first grade when I wrote and illustrated my first title, “The Cat Who Loved to Play”—edgy, I
know.
In second grade I wrote “The Traveling Seed” and managed to win the class Young Authors
competition, which included a trip to a regional conference. It was an early
highlight in my academic career for sure. That was when the bug really bit.
I would write every
chance I got, preferring writing assignments in school when given the
choice. It never felt like work, and it
was always fun for me.”
DeWildt had hopes of becoming a screenwriter and
studied film production at Grand Valley State University. During this time he wrote two novels, which
he described as “garbage” only to become frustrated when he couldn’t get them
published.
He then
married in July 2003 and he and Sarah moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky in 2003
where he earned a graduate degree in biology in 2007 from Western Kentucky
University.
“I was trying to expand
my horizons a bit, not knowing that I was really preparing myself for my future
as an author. Writing my cave beetle thesis was a tremendous grammar and style
boot camp. Additionally, the time away from writing fiction, working outside
myself, allowed me to develop my skills as an observer, which is the first
thing a writer needs to be in my opinion.”
Love You To A Pulp’s atmosphere is based on
fact: the descriptions are from the Mammoth Cave National Park, and its surrounding
woods and caves that DeWildt explored extensively and collected ecological data
from as an intern for the Park Service.
“The town of Brownsville
is a real place too, although my version is completely fictional with the exception
of the Porky Pig Diner, a few landmarks, and the scene in which my protagonist
pulls a swollen tick from his scrotum, an equally disconcerting version of that
happened to me, just another hazard of spending all hours in the woods.”
DeWildt did not begin writing Love
You To A Pulp until 2011, after he and his wife moved to Tucson,
Arizona and had their first two children.
“I began writing about
the father-son experience, and these stories were set in rural Kentucky. The
parent-child theme of Love You to a Pulp
was born from those stories. As I wrote the main narrative, I decided I also
wanted to explore my protagonist’s past. Initially it was just to create some
sympathy for a character that was fun to write, but not particularly likeable.
As I continued exploring, I stumbled on the parallel narrative that eventually
tied into the main plot, which occurs twenty years later. I didn’t intend initially
anyway for the two narratives to merge the way they did, I thought I was
connecting them in theme only, and their purpose beyond that was to create
sympathy for my pretty unsympathetic protagonist. But then suddenly, it just
clicked for me how these past events were truly connected and the story took on
a new dimension.”
He finally found a publisher and the
final edits for Love You To A Pulp were completed toward the end of 2014.
“I
had two different publication deals fall apart before finally connecting with
the guys at All Due Respect Books. They’re wonderful and I highly recommend
crime/noir writers submit their manuscript to them.”
The books that influenced DeWildt the
most in writing Love You To A Pulp are the crime fiction novels by Jim Thompson
and Cormac McCarthy. http://www.cormacmccarthy.com
“Rinthy
is a name I lifted from Cormac McCarthy’s Outer
Dark. Both Thompson and McCarthy
have this amazing ability to present the darkest events and themes with
beautiful prose. I wanted to combine the
storytelling of Thompson with my attempt at language in the vein of McCarthy,
that was the plan anyway.
I’m also influenced by the cinema. Chinatown was a huge influence on the story I wanted to tell.
And the initial
inspiration for Neil was the Bud White character from the film adaptation of
James Ellroy’s, L.A. Confidential.”
The
end result is a realistic novel with
three elements - that of the literary,
the crime noir, and a love story – that is superbly written and requires more
than one reading to fully understand the novel’s full meaning.
The novel alternates between chapters
focused on present life of Neil Chambers and his life as a young teenager.
Work was all that kept him going, but the
work had dried up. That was a symptom of being a snoop in a small town like
Brownsville: alienation, enemies. Neil figured he made two enemies for every
client he served. People don’t
appreciate being checked on. They don’t
forget.
Excerpt,
Page 7
Neil is a 13 year old who lives with an
alcoholic suicidal father and a mother who is a whore. Neil is also a punching bag for his father –
he participates in cockfights, in which Neil normally wins, bringing home up to
$3,000 per fight.
The thing Neil remembered most about his
mama was the coming and going of men.
Daddy would sit perched in the arm chair in front of the TV with his
beer and shotgun, playing sentry while the men pulled up to the house, one
after another in turn. It was Neil’s job
to see the door, let the men in and point them to the back room
Excerpt,
Page 13
When money got tight, which was often,
Neil’s daddy fought him like a man fights his dog or game cock. Full of Maker’s Mark he’d grab Neil by the
scruff and throw him into the Cutlass.
“Ye gonna win, Neily?” his daddy would
say. Neil would nod, thinking about the
bleeding and the swelling and the recovery.
If they’d manage to scrape any change together, they’d hit the drive
through for a breakfast sandwich or a hamburger. When they pulled into the restaurant, Neil
would think about jumping out of the car in protest, running, or at least
refusing to eat the food. But the smell
of the meal would make his mouth water and he couldn’t stop himself ripping
away the wrapping and eating the food in a few chocking bites, then with his
belly full, it was hard to deny his daddy anything. Neil’s daddy would watch him out the corner of
his eye, bottle to lips, smiling, drops of brown whisky running down his chin.
“If ye win, we’ll be back on track and we
won’t have to do this no more.”
Neil had lived that sentiment many times,
through the wins and losses they always ended up at the same place eventually,
his daddy broke financially, and Neil just broke. It was a cycle as regular as the Kentucky
seasons.
Excerpt,
pages 18-19
Love You To A Pulp is also a psycho
analysis of Neil – a heartbroken revengeful youth still in love with his first
love Rinthy trapped in the middle aged man’s body – a body that is addicted to
porn, violence, and glue inhalation.
“Rinthy is literally the only positive thing in young Neil’s
life. We see her through Neil’s eyes and the fact that he has nothing else,
combined with the fact that young love and lust can be blindingly intense, we
don’t pick up on Rinthy’s flaws. There is one line of dialogue that exposes a
darker side to her, but it’s subtle and only becomes clear later in the book
when we learn about Rinthy’s home life.”
he
had to look and there she was, ghost
white Rinthy coming up on him stone gray eyes and snaggletooth smile. Neil saw that and he passed out cold with
fear.
“Hey, hey,” Rinthy said, shaking
Neil. “You alright? You need me to fetch somebody?” Neil opened his eyes and let the pieces fall
together and he sat up and scrambled to his feet, looking down at the girl as
she continued to kneel in her cotton dress and dirty feet. He felt the fool again.
“I’m fine. What are you doing here? This is my place.”
She looked hurt, her kindness thrown down
and stomped “Ain’t just your place. I come here too and I know for fact it ain’t
your land.”
“How do you know it ain’t?”
“You got a deed?”
“Yea, it’s at my house.”
“Liar.
You can’t own it. You ain’t but a
squirt.”
“Look who’s talking you runt. And it is at my house. It’s my daddy’s. And he’s dead so that makes it mine.”
“Well, if that’s the truth I’m sorry for
your daddy being dead, but I ain’t moving out of here until you come on back
with that deed and show me, or the law and run me off for trespassing.”
“I could shoot you for trespassing right
now and I’d be in my rights.”
“You don’t even have a gun. I’d bet all the money in the bank you don’t.”
“Then you’d lose it.”
“So show me.”
Excerpt,
pages 73-74
His worlds of past and present began to
converge by page 8 when drug store owner and supposedly pillar of the community
Jenkins hires Neil to break up his daughter Helen’s relationship with her lover
Hoon and bring her back home to him.
Neal takes on the job only to find Hoon’s dead body, which the coroner
insists is a suicide, but Chambers believes otherwise.
Neil’s eyes adjusted and he neatly missed
the feet just off to the side of him.
Hoon was hanging by his neck from the rafter. His face and neck were purple above the
noose. Neil looked closer and saw the
scratches above and below the rope. Hoon
had tried to claw himself free. On the
floor, below the dead man’s feet was the bottle of pills, surely a small
portion of Jenkins’ missing narcotics. Though swelled with death, the boy looked as
if he’d taken a recent beating in addition to the one Neil gave him. That and the scratches pretty clearly mapped
out the dance steps that led to Hoon there on the floor. Whoever wanted to make it look like a suicide
didn’t care too much for the details. Neil took a final look at Hoon’s purple face
before he slipped back out the window.
Except,
pages 32-33
Who is the murderer? Is it Helen Jenkins, Hoon’s lover; Heidi
Skaggs, Hoon’s ex-wife, now a socialite married to the richest man in town; the
mysterious Skaggs’s employee and part-time stripper Lotta; Mr. Paul Skaggs
himself; or the mysterious Sheriff who keeps on following Neil’s every move?
Regardless of who the culprit is – the
reader cheers for Neil Chambers – a very much tormented and violent man that
has been on a quest since he was just a boy.
Neil pulled off his t-shirt, he was
scarred up and down the torso, memories of road rash and knife fights. Over his heart was his own heart tattoo, not
a valentine but a four-chambered, fist sized, human heart, drawn out of an
anatomy textbook. Inside was written,
‘Rinthy’.
“What’s a Rinthy?” Helen asked.
“She’s a person.”
Excerpt,
page 125
“The climax was the most
compelling to write. The reveal of
hidden motives, the violent confrontation, I vividly remember writing it and it
poured out of me in a kind of frenzy. It was a key scene in the arc of my
character, an opportunity for him to take a moral stand and crack some
deserving skulls.”
“There,” Lotta said, giving Neil the lead. He took it and his hand went to the butt of
his piece, ready to draw, hoping that behind the door was something other than
another question or blow to the head.
His hand rested on the faux crystal knob. The hot sweat and musk of sex hung in the
air. The sound of passions.
“Who’s in there?”
“Go in and see for yourself.”
He did.
And He saw.
Excerpt,
Pages 142-143
And finally at the end the quest comes to a
screeching halt when Neil’s two lives converge in shades of red violence,
heartbroken love, a grave of a young girl and her newborn baby, a shotgun
waving in his hands, and a huge big question mark leaving the readers grasping
for more.
Neil dropped down into the mouth of the cave,
maneuvering his dangling, dying limb at the shoulder, holding the rock and root
with the other as he lowered himself, hanging in the blackness, stretching
himself as low as he could before dropping to the cold rock floor below.
Excerpt,
Pages 159-160
“The ending was
intentionally ambiguous, not because I wanted it to be, but because I really
didn’t know what Neil was going to do. I’ll tell you for sure that Davey did
not make it out of the cave.”
Fortunately for the reader DeWildt is in the
process of writing the sequel, which is scheduled for a 2017 release.
“Neil’s
story is still revealing itself to me as a mosaic. I’m working on a stand-alone
sequel that again tells two different stories on two different timelines. The
question of what happened to Neil on the banks of the Green River will be
answered. I know now what happened, but I’m not quite ready to share.”
Neil woke and lay listening to the Green
River, trying to place the sound, knowing well he was in that secret moment
just before reality fully disconnects from the dream world, something nagging
at the back of his mind. He saw Jessup
tugging at his leg, way back before. He
felt the pull and then the pull became his name. Rinthy was calling him. He pulled himself to his feet, stumbling over
his own weakness.
“Rinthy!
Where are you? Rinthy!”
“Neil!”
she said. The sound was so slight
it was a whisper in his ear.
Excerpt,
page 110
DeWildt
writes in the dining room that is used only as a makeshift office, which he
described as a writer’s mess, littered with laptop, notes, books, his
children’s toys with a locked window that gives him a view of the Rincon
Mountains east of Tucson.
“I’m
always “writing”, but that doesn’t mean I’m always getting the words on the
page. My projects occupy my mind
constantly, and I often come home with notes and dialogue on scraps of paper
that I add to the pile until I’m ready to cobble something together. When I’m ready to get words down I have
always been much more productive in the morning. I try to get up between 3 and 4 a.m. to write
before I need to prepare for my day job as a language arts teacher. I love
early mornings – the dark, the quiet, the peace – they’re lovely.”
Photo 27
Photograph
Description And Copyright Information
Photo
1
CS
DeWildt
Copyright
granted by CS DeWildt
Photo
2
Severed
ear on the lawn film clip from BLUE VELVET by David Lunch
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law.
Photo
3
Jacket
front cover Love You To A Pulp
Photo
4
Jacket
back cover Love You To A Pulp
Photo
5
All
Due Respect logo
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
6
CS.
DeWildt
Copyright
granted by CS DeWildt
Photo
7
Vagabondage
Press logo
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
8
Candy And Cigarettes front jacket cover
Photo
9
Candy And
Cigarettes
back jacket cover
Photo
10
Martial
Lit web logo
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
11
Dead
Animals
jacket cover
Photo
12
Bartleby
Snopes logo
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
13
The Louisville
Problem
jacket cover
Photo
14
David
Lynch in France
CCASA
3.0
Photo
15
Jacket
poster describing Neil Chambers from Love You To A Pulp
Copyright
granted by CS DeWildt
Photo
16
CS
DeWildt in the first grade
Copyright
granted by CS DeWildt
Photo
17
Grand
Valley State University Web logo
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
18
Western
Kentucky University Web Logo
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
19
CS
DeWildt as an intern for the Park Service
Copyright
granted by CS DeWildt
Photo
20
Mammoth
Cave National Park web logo
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
21
Porky
Pig Diner Facebook logo
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
22
CS
DeWildt, wife Sarah, with their first son
Copyright
granted by CS DeWildt
Photo
23
Man
holding jacket cover of Love You To A Pulp
Copyright granted by CS DeWildt
Copyright granted by CS DeWildt
Photo
24
Box
of copies of Love You To A Pulp
Copyright
granted by CS DeWildt
Photo
25
All
Due Respect logo
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
26
Jim
Thompson’s publicity photo
Public
Domain
Photo 27
Cormac
McCarthy
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
28
Cormac
McCarthy web site’s logo
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
29
Jacket
cover of Outer Dark
Photo
30
Chinatown movie poster
Photo
31
Film
clip from LA Confidential with Russell Crow as Bud White.
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
32
James
Ellroy
CCASA
Photo
33
L.A.
Confidential
jacket cover
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo
34
L.A.
Confidential
movie poster
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
Photos
35, 36, 38, 40, 41, and 42
Jacket
covers of Love You To A Pulp
Photo 37
Rinthy
Attributed to Edvard Munch "The Separation"
Public Domain
Photoshopped by Christal Rice Cooper
Photo 43
Rinthy
Attributed to Edvard Munch "The Separation"
Public Domain
Photoshopped by Christal Rice Cooper
Photo 43
View
of the Rincon Mountains
Public
Domain
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