#FollowFriday: Why In Hell Aren’t You Reading Christa Faust?
Very occasionally, you come across books that fit your interests so very perfectly that it’s almost like the author had you in mind when they wrote it. That’s pretty much the experience I had when I first heard mention of Christ Fausts’s Hoodtown, a novel in the hard-boiled tradition that’s set in a ghetto where the predominant culture has been heavily influenced by masked Lucha Libre traditions. It’s a world where people swear by El Santo, where a serial killer horrifies a community by stealing the masks of his victims, and where the hero is a burnt-out old rudo named X whose been trying to live up to the mistakes of her past. Seriously, people. Noir and Mexican masked wrestlers. The only way this book could have been more my thing is if it came personally autographed, made me nachos every time I started reading it, and offered to bring back WCW so we could kickstart the Monday Night Wars.