Running Dog

I'm not a big reader of crime fiction, although I do have a stack of Raymond Chandler books that I swear I'll get to one day. It does seem to me though that a lot of writers want to write Chandler style crime stories but because they're supposed to be post-modern they have to put some kind of odd existential spin on it, as if modern audiences can't handle something straightforward, relatively speaking. Of course, the other... Read Full Review

Everything I like in a novel is here - humor, darkness, and strange and lusty wounded characters with noir capabilities. DeLillo has a knack for holding your hand down into some black tunnels and just when you are beginning to wonder how solid the ground you are standing on is he lets go. A terrific piece of fiction.

For me, the great pleasures of DeLillo are his absolute narrative control and his precise descriptiveness. Here's a quick example, with the character Selvy on the southwestern desert: "That day was like this one. A morning of startling brightness. Clarity without distracting glare. The sky was saturated with light. Everything was color." At the same time, DeLillo's narratives are sometimes about characters on meaningless quests-think... Read Full Review

For anyone who is looking to get involved in the paranoiac, conspiracy-riddled world of Don DeLillo, Running Dog is a perfect jumping-off point. Replete with all the DeLillo standards-ambiguous, dangerous characters, postmodern disenchantment, the spectre of violence and war, voyeurism, as well as humor, compassion and loss-Running Dog serves as DeLillo 101. Before engaging in the complexities of White Noise, Underworld, Mao... Read Full Review