Forward Magazine

The dangerous hitchhiker is a trope familiar to any fan film noir, who will instantly recognize a tale bound to end badly.  Driven by primal appetites––greed, sex, survival––noir is all style, speed, and suspense in a Hobbesian world where everyone is either predator or patsy.  It’s a powerful, but its strength lies in black-and-white simplicity, and an author adds shades of gray at his peril

Tom “T” Walker, protagonist of this novel, knows he’s asking for trouble when he stops for the beautiful girl by the side of the road, especially when her leather-jacketed “brother” also appears and climbs into the back seat of T’s Range Rover.  But he doesn’t’ care: at fifty-seven, he’s well-heeled and well-educated, but his life is badly awry.  He has, readers soon learn, recently completed parole after serving time for possession of child pornography.

His passengers are clearly in trouble, too, but their stories keep changing.  Is seductive Jen an innocent bystander as she claims, or her companion’s partner in crime?  Is the mercurial Lester some kind of warped guardian angel, or her victim?  And when she cozies up to their dazzled but mesmerized captive, is Jen truly hoping for a savior from her own sordid past, or is T just pawn in a twisted mind game?

The author is best known for gritty stories about marginal people––his collection, Acid, won the Richard Sullivan Prize for Short Fiction––but his novels have been less well received, perhaps because shocking events and unexpected behaviors that in a compressed form can produce startling moments of insight come to seem overwrought under lengthier scrutiny.  Falco’s key themes are desire, love, trust, and betrayal, but while he raises provocative issues and, in T, presents a plausibly flawed but essentially well-meaning character; Wolf Point doesn’t really live up to its highest ambitions.

Falco’s prose itself is admirable, his plot generates momentum and suspense, and he has a fine ear for dialogue.   Considering the sexually charged mise en scene, he handles his more explicit material with surprising discretion; this is no book for prim readers, but it isn’t prurient either.  Yet though T is by and large believably human, like  a Frederick Barthelme character lost in James Elroy territory, he sometimes seems too clueless and morally obtuse for a person as thoughtful as the author wants him to be.

Classic noir draws its suspense from uncertainty, not ambiguity, and closes with its “hero” sadder but wiser.  Wolf Point’s attempt to replace the noir’s signature cynicism with psychological substance, on the other hand, turns out to be a triumph of hope over experience––and as anyone versed in noir can attest, that’s as chancy as stopping for a hitchhiker.  Still, readers in search of a straightforward thriller will find plenty of tension on the way to a slam-bang climax

––Peyton Moss