Dennis E. Bolen Official Literary Site

Quill and Quire Review May 2011

Vancouver is Awesome April 2011

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kaspoit

Broken Pencil
Book Review: Kaspoit!
by Dennis E. Bolen

Kaspoit! Function: noun Etymology: imitative; date: 2009; Definition: the natural noise of a beer can being opened. -- Kaspoit! intransitive verb.

Above is one of the pieces of paratext used to frame the novel; I immediately knew Kaspoit! wasn't a regular sort of crime novel, and reading the book confirmed this assumption. Bolen's fifth novel, Kaspoit! is absolutely raw, dirty, violent and disturbing. It is set in Vancouver, British Columbia and re-imagines a series of disturbing crimes targeted towards sex workers in Western Canada. Bolen gives us a chilling and dense look at the rowdy underworld of organized crime and specifically the villainous life of Gort and his reckless gang of associates. The plot predominantly revolves around the space of the Booze Can, a psycho's paradise where the only sources of fun are sex, drugs, booze and death -- and not everyone who comes at night leaves in the morning. In this world, prostitutes are abused, bodies disappear and cops are corrupt. The most disturbing part of the book is how plausible its plot actually seems.

Bolen writes using the obscure dialogue of street thugs, and the action is described through neologistic language and portmanteaus -"Side fire hulkFest. Kaspoit! Hulkshiver. HalfCan drainBack. DarkEdge femmeGiggle. HulkDaze fireStare. TalkDrone."

This sort of minimalist approach to writing sidesteps the excesses of language and immerses the reader directly into the centre of the violence. It is especially an appropriate form since the characters of this book seem to act more than they think, and if they find themselves in a situation where logic is necessary, it is only used to find the quickest and easiest solution to the problem. What I find most suiting about Bolen's style, however, is that this unconventional approach to writing also separates the reader from the characters' actions. Their actions are so extreme and perverse that they are difficult (I would hope) to relate to. Yet at the same time the horror is fully communicated. Overall, this reduction of language is effective, it focuses the novel and turns it into a gripping and satisfying read. (Eric Schmaltz)

Source: http://www.brokenpencil.com/view.php?id=5354

San Antonio Dead Rats
Some thoughts on Kaspoit!
by Dennis E. Bolen

Kaspoit! by Dennis E. Bolen is a book about a violence not usually associated with Canada. But that is not it's only unique quality. The fashion in which the story is recounted, through the use of compound words and dialog, depicts the horrifying events in a way that traditional narrative couldn't. Fiction is an excellent way to try to make sense of events or people we don't understand. Kaspoit! delves into a realm of brutality that has haunted Canadians for years in just such an effort.

The title of the book itself refers to the sound of a beer opening. I must say, I will never open a beer again without the word popping into my head. The reason the title is given a sound, I think, is because the book itself is human and irreducible and vacuous; after all the sound is gone once the can is opened, only to be replaced by the invariably transient sound of another can opening. The characters try to derive meaning through the action of opening cans and bottles but there is never really any meaning to it: only an insatiable emptiness.

Many of the compound words are single syllable words linked together in pairs, which give it a very rhythmic feel: HulkChug canToss (pg. 99) [I've left out quotes because there are no quotes in the book. Italics are also italicized in the book.] But even in the case of two syllable words, it has a very similar effect, as in this exchange: That reminds me. FileDrawer. Here. CrossTable paperToss. This is something important. (pg. 97)

Here is one of the few scenes, all of which are told in this manner:
FortyfiveShot glassHail.
FlashMuzzle strobeScape.
HulkFall sloMo strobeStage.
SpeedBullet thwockLeather.
TeeterKill gunGrapple.
AngerFire blindStrobe blastClamour.
KillerSquirm downFloor gunGrapple.
(pg. 126)

Even in the reader's head, the rhythm is such that one cannot help but lower one's voice after the first compound word, pausing slightly between compounds. This focuses the readers attention largely on the mesmerizing rhythm, the action of which is nearly secondary yet clearly visual and poignant. It denotes the characters' violent yet nonchalant behavior. The characters, like the reader, lull themselves into more and more violent acts through habitual action (a vicious Fibonacci Sequence).

Certain terms in the compounds generally refer to certain individuals or individuals in a group. For example, the main character, Gort, is often referenced by "hulk" in the compound words throughout the novel (though to a lesser extent, the other characters in his "gentleman's club" -- pg. 180 -- are also referred to by this designation), while here "killer" is one of the two assassins (Flame or Chico). These are used rather loosely because they are all monsters, hulks and killers, but in certain scenarios, it is usually apparent to whom they are referring. These terms, because they are used as compound noun/verbs, create a singular dimension to these characters, which is filled in through their dialog. It inexorably separates them. The comic book-like quality it instills in the characters limns them both as atrocious and ridiculous. These folks are bumblers and the compound words skip and stagger, mimicking their behavior. The style is a pared down version of what Bolen did in "Workers," a short story from the collection entitled Gas Tank & Other Stories (my post about it). It makes the "telling" of the story even more desperate and aggressive.

Ultimately, and ironically, the compound words aid in making this book quite funny. It's a dark humor, kind of like The Sopranos (one of the funniest shows I've seen), but an insistent one (I considered comparing it to Flannery O'Connor, but then I saw that someone has already made that connection on the back cover of the book). There is a scene where a woman, Janis McReedy, from court services shows up to complete the pre-sentencing report for Scroaty (he was caught going over the border with drugs -- the least of his crimes, and it was unwittingly committed). She's very proper and oblivious and demands that he not use foul language, which all of the killers use as crutches. Of course she ends up dead, and the irony and juxtaposition is very funny (and the fact that she just keeps asking questions -- with no sense of the danger she's in -- right up to the point that she's killed). (pgs. 79 - 91)

The ending is shocking and meaningless at the same time. In some ways it's a retelling of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, but with a much less self-reflexive Raskolnikov. Kaspoit! is a disturbing book, but a mesmerizing one, that leaves the reader with questions. Questions about the events. About the characters. About the actuality. Questions about fiction itself. How does this novel inform the reader about the perpetrators? And fiction, at least good fiction, has a way of leaving readers with questions. It also has a way of making them think about how they might answer them. After all, it was the very fact that Iago didn't have hooves that made him so horrifying and so mundane.

This is the type of novel that reminds me why I write and why I read.

exhaled by Lyle Rosdahl at 2/19/2010

Source: http://deadratspress.blogspot.com/2010/02/kaspoit.html

Ottawa Citizen

Looking evil in the eye
Brilliantly disturbing novel echoes the Pickton murder case
By Les Wiseman, Canwest News Service January 10, 2010

Kaspoit!
By Dennis E. Bolen
Anvil Press, $20

How close can one get to look evil in the eye? When you look long enough into the void, the void begins to look back through you, as Nietzsche wrote. When writers, through their craft, investigate evil, they go to places where the splatter gets on them, where doors are opened in the psyche that should have been left closed and can never be shut again.

So, while I admire Vancouver's Dennis E. Bolen for his strength in unleashing this unflinching fictional evocation of evil surrounding an infamous B.C. pig farm, I feel sorry that this writer feels compelled to dive so fully into the sewage of human sin to create his art.

Kaspoit! is either a sublime literary work of near genius or is one of the most wretched wallows in the dark mire of the soul ever published.

It took a lot of guts to write this book. It takes a lot of guts to read it.

Kaspoit! is the sound of a beer can opening, which punctuates many sections of this novel. The story is told strictly in dialogue and sound effects. The characters are white-trash criminals. The masterminds do well financially. The hands lead lives of cracker hedonism, beer, reefer, some E and skid-row hookers. In the compound of the swine ranch, they have a clubhouse, a sort of sub-gentlemen's hangout, where anything goes. And, if the prostitutes suffer some ill treatment, even death, well, there's a half-wit gofer named Friendly, who will dismember them and get rid of the parts.

Elmore Leonard most famously noted that criminals are not usually the sharpest knives in the Ginsu set. The sheer pig (and I use the term advisedly) ignorance of this coterie of creeps, their monstrous amorality, their casual cruelty and lack of any moral compass is enough to give readers a sick feeling.

Plus, that language -- savage, profane and merciless, all delivered in a fever-dream delirium of brief fragments of conversation. It is like James Ellroy's White Jazz made even speedier. The reader needs to learn a new language that hurtles through acts of depravity and dissolution. And when you put the book down, it is a relief. It is a Necronomicon of putrescence made all the more poignant in that it appears to be a speculation on what might have gone on at the famous pig farm and a thinly veiled revisioning of other recent western Canadian crimes.

Bolen grew up on Vancouver Island, studied creative writing at the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia, and taught creative writing at the latter. He was a federal parole officer in the Vancouver area for 23 years. His previous novels -- Stupid Crimes, Krekshuns and Toy Gun --feature parole officer Barry Delta. He has also published a historical novel about the Holocaust, Stand in Hell, and a book of short fiction, Gas Tank& Other Stories.

Reader beware, Kaspoit! is one rough book, not for the easily upset, a drop into a maelstrom of evil, a harrowing ride. Bolen makes the really rough writers, including Rex Miller, Derek Raymond and Mo Hayder, look tame. But, if you can handle it, you'll soon realize you're reading a work of stark brilliance.

Several elements make this book work. Its experimentation with new words is successful. Bolen has such a knack for creating believable dialogue that puts the reader in the scene. To write so well that it has a physical impact on the reader is rare.

The story itself is so compelling that the reader returns to the book, though repelled by it.

Les Wiseman is former associate editor of Vancouver magazine and western editor of TV Guide.

Source: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Looking+evil/2425613/story.html

Georgia Straight

Book review: Kaspoit! by Dennis E. Bolen
By Alexander Varty
Publish Date: January 21, 2010

Published by Anvil Press, 258 pp, $20, softcover

"Kaspoit", apparently, is the sound of a beer can being opened, but you'll want a shot of something stronger once you've finished Vancouver author Dennis E. Bolen's fifth novel.

Both a profoundly problematic undertaking and a tour de force of thug-life horror, the book is a fictionalized account of what might have gone on at a certain Port Coquitlam pig farm where the DNA of 32 women was found during a massive forensic investigation. If you've ever felt that the publication ban on Robert Pickton's speedy trial and conviction smelled strongly of cover-up, this is for you. Bolen essentially accuses certain elements of the RCMP of colluding with organized crime - while perhaps not directly complicit in the killings, certainly willing to overlook a few dead hookers so long as the kickbacks continued.

Kaspoit!'s real villain, a nameless and shadowy RCMP inspector, puts it this way in one of the longer passages of a book that's made up almost entirely of terse and testosterone-charged dialogue: "All anybody's going to know is what they read in the papers. And after the info spigot gets turned off everything in the media will be mainly fiction if it isn't already. Our cops'll only develop evidence to convict the filthy slob. They're stretched anyway. No overtime. And you and I know damn well the rank and file police crowd is generally as dumb as the general public anyway."

Given recent incidents of police malfeasance, this doesn't sound like groundless supposition - and Bolen's 23-year career as a federal parole officer has undoubtedly given him access to the seamier side of the justice system. But it's impossible to avoid another, almost equally unsettling, feeling, which is that the author himself is guilty of profiting from the murders. Is he performing a macabre public service by putting common speculation into print, or simply pandering to ghoulish curiosity?

Your guess is as good as mine, but I'll grant Bolen this: Kaspoit!'s nightmares are plausible, and dawn alone won't make them disperse.

Click HERE for reader's comments.
Source: www.straight.com/article-281311/vancouver/bolen-delves-nightmare

Uptown Magazine (Winnipeg)

Terribly, tragically realistic
Dennis E. Bolen's novel Kaspoit concerns crime in Vancouver
- and fiction reads a lot like fact
Quentin Mills-Fenn 2009-02-04

Dennis E. Bolen, a former federal parole officer in Vancouver, has written a tough, unflinching and distinctive crime novel, one that's completely compelling.

Kaspoit! (Anvil Press) is told entirely in dialogue interspersed with portmanteau constructions: "GoofLook LeerSneer BlackJean hulkSit." Possibly distracting, in fact, the style quickly grows on the reader. As Bolen strips the humanity from his narrative, the barren rhythms propel the story. After all, people reveal so much of themselves through their own words.

The story concerns a Vancouver motorcycle gang involved in drug grow-ops, prostitution and murder. There are corrupt cops and hired killers, mean streets and houses in Surrey.

The worst acts take place on a farm outside the city limits. There's a booze can and also a trailer where the boys can take advantage of sex workers rounded up from the street. Some of these women don't make it back to the city. The story has echoes of convicted murderer Robert Pickton and the events which occurred on his Port Coquitlam farm. This is a nightmare world, filled with betrayal, violence and horrific, callous brutality towards women. Tragically, shamefully, as the B.C. Missing Women Investigation shows, these scenes are not far removed from reality.

Incidentally, the title apparently refers to the sound of a beer can opening, although I don't hear that myself. No matter. Kaspoit! is a true achievement.
Source: www.uptownmag.com/2009-02-04/page5326.aspx

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gast ank

San Antonio Dead Rats
the fly in the ointment
Gas Tank& Other Stories

An inspired and intriguing collection of stories from the Canadian (it shouldn't matter, but it is distinctly Canadian) author Dennis E. Bolen.

The Fatality
Fight
Fishboat
Toba Inlet
Gas Tank
Workers

They range from six pages to seventy, making for a well-rounded read. The pace is pretty steady throughout the stories meaning the short ones jab at the reader, leaving them slightly stunned and requiring them to piece together the "meaning." The longer ones are very different. "Fight" traces the life of a soldier from 1915 to 1986. It is gruesome and honest and lonely. "Workers" holds similar values, but has a much different tone due to it's unique narrative. It feels like a play or a Raymond Chandler short story where the dialog is not set apart by quotations marks and the narrative is sparse and almost direction-like. Here, however, the narrative voice is congealed through the use of compound words (creating parts of speech hybrids):

Upknocks tablespray booze. Closefollowing-Jerry restraining John. Aimpunching-Carl at John's chin. Fight underway. Booziness of all concerned. General fighting skill comiclack. Conflict funnily violenceless. Womenconcern screams and actionavoidance. Jerry accepts Carlpunch and descends. John swingbacks. (161)

This creates a blocky rhythm and sense of action/description. It sounds almost like stage directions, which means that it has a certain sense of immediacy, but also of fiction (in other words, we're reading it like a director would read a play and think about how it might be performed). Quite a disarming way to write a short story. I'm not sure what it says about the narrator (is it a machine from the factory?). It does mimic the sort of boxy, repetitive action of the workers in the factory and at home and between each other. Again, showing both the immediacy of their actions and their separateness from one another.

A riveting read from start to finish. I miss reading collections of short stories. The way they interact as well as stand alone.

EXHALED BY LYLE ROSDAHL AT 1/09/2010

Source: http://deadratspress.blogspot.com/2010/01/gas-tank-other-stories.html

British Journal of Canadian Studies

1999; vol 14; Pt. 1; pp. 147-148

Dennis E. Bolen, Gas Tank& Other Stories (Vancouver: Anvil Press Publishers, 1998), 186pp. Paper. $14.95.ISBN 1-895636-15-9.

Brutality, death and moral vacuums are the stuff of Dennis Bolen’s new collection of short stories and novellas. Bolen’s reputation to date rests largely on his ability to represent the underside of contemporary society with gritty, unflinching accuracy. Gas Tank& Other Stories will confirm this distinctive Bolen territory with its blend of understated grotesquerie and a social realist’s concern for human lives blighted by neglect, indifference and exploitation. Each piece in the collection focuses on the individual's capacity to absorb threat and damage—physical, psychological, emotional—and still endure. But Bolen also shows how human capacity for resilience and survival is much darker and more ambivalent than our cultural myths of heroic suffering suggest. Most of the men—and it is noticeably men, not women—who are the focus of his imaginative dissections are hurt by circumstances they cannot control: a motorcycle accident, a childhood of neglect and sexual abuse, the insane demands of officer in the Great War, soul-numbing manual labour. Often against the odds, the protagonists somehow cope with the capricious brutality of twentieth-century life, but the transformations which they undergo as a result are disturbing. The central character of‘The Fatality’ recovers from his motor accident, but when his brain damage increasingly impedes his capacity to integrate with others, he commits suicide to the shock of the adolescent narrator, and the callous knowingness of his father. Richard, the private in the impressive First World War novella‘Fight’ survives the 'familiar hell' of trench warfare, but only by becoming a savage, crazed, killing-machine, a skilled choreographer of‘an artful blood-ballet’. Jerry, the thoughtful peacemaker and supportive colleague on the assembly-line in‘Workers’, deals with the psychological frustrations of his limiting job through sadistic sex and physical attacks on his wife.

In the end it is violence which is the resonant theme of Bolen's collection. Everything—and nothing—provokes it: international conflict, personal disappointment, abusive treatment, boredom. And in‘Gas Tank’ and‘Toba Inlet’ a frenzy to destroy, to align oneself with acts of bizarre annihilation is represented as an inexplicable, irrational, but irresistible impulse. Bolen's down-to-earth and clinically spare style works well in constructing a world where there are few ideals or comforting myths to sustain the spirit.‘Workers’, with its self-consciously poetic rhythms and coined diction, vaguely reminiscent of later Joyce, seems more strained in its attempt to foreground crude colloquialisms and mean-spirited attitudes—the verbal and mental equivalents of the physical brutishness highlighted in other stories. Nonetheless the overall effect of the collection is powerful. Bolen's vision of the contemporary world makes uncomfortable reading. For many, violence is an occasional aberration or an unattractive feature of the more squalid sections of society but, in Bolen's landscape, everyone experiences violence of some kind as a tool of control and in turn logically embraces it as a means of self-assertion against indignity and alienation. Gas Tank reinterprets our world as one dangerously but inevitably consumed by‘concentrated rage’ and a fervour to do damage.

Maureen Moran
Brunel University

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Prairiefire
A Canadian Magazine of New Writing
Summer 2006

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Front and Center Magazine

Reprinted from Issue #14

Toy Gun
By Dennis E. Bolen
Anvil Press, p. 336, $26.00

Review by Philip David Alexander

Picture this: You work a dirty and difficult job on Vancouver’s mean streets. Your boss Myra is a by-the-book woman who watches you like a hawk. Your caseload includes a crackhead security guard who is still pulling robberies and thinks he’s got you fooled, a repeat offender hooker and the damaged son of a criminal who was once under your watch. This is the world of Barry Delta, parole officer and protagonist in Dennis E. Bolen’s third Delta instalment Toy Gun. The first two Delta books were Stupid Crimes and Krekshuns. Both offered up engaging plots and were peopled with vivid characters. Delta himself was (and is) tough, philosophical, cunning and surprisingly, vulnerable. Bolen really mines the inner workings of Delta in this story. In the process, he delivers a two-fisted character study that puts the reader right on the damp and gloomy streets that Delta trudges.
Delta still dodges people who would like to see him dead and there is definitely plenty of action and chiselled, almost hardboiled, prose:

“Barry parked on an eastside street so iffy he wondered if he would ever see the government car again. In this particular block he had once heard gunshots in the middle of the day. Down the street the stripped hulk of a not so old SUV rusted on bare rims. Hookers stood on opposing curbs. Pugilistic men with shaved heads patrolled in cars with blacked-out windows. Asian gangsters dined for free in terrified noodle houses.”

But to call Toy Gun a crime or procedural novel would be to sell the whole work short. Toy Gun is about a man who clashes with the people he needs most and bends over backwards to offer the often undeserving reprobates on his caseload a second kick at the can. In Delta, Bolen gives us a man who is filled with both compassion and dedication for all that his job entails, with anger and confusion for the fallout that has poisoned his personal life.
One of the chains Delta carries is his womanizing. Consider this excerpt where Barry Delta is pondering an argument he’s just had with his wife Tanya:

“… for a moment the intimacy of their struggle moved Barry, brought him closer to Tanya, yet the iniquitous presence of others in the room– known by him, hidden from Tanya– scorched him like acid. Sitting with them were all of his female friends… He was nauseated and wallowing, a swimmer in refuse with no chance of rescue and years gone by without a clean breath.”

Toy Gun is filled with powerful moments that add up to knowing Delta so well you can’t help but hang on, white knuckled, to see if he works it all out. This shadowing character study, with its beautifully rendered moments between Delta and his wives and lovers, might put the reader in mind of Denis Johnson but the overarching theme of a hard man pursuing a fleeting redemption, attempting to bust out of an emotional jail he helped create, is pure James Elroy. And when it comes to novels filled with criminality and complex characters, I can't think of a higher compliment. On a sad note, Toy Gun is reportedly the last of the Barry Delta trilogy. Let’s hope Bolen has second thoughts and decides for at least a quintet.

Source: http://www.ardentdreams.com/bbp/fc/index.html

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gast ank

British Journal of Canadian Studies

1999; vol 14; Pt. 1; pp. 147-148

Dennis E. Bolen, Gas Tank& Other Stories (Vancouver: Anvil Press Publishers, 1998), 186pp. Paper. $14.95.ISBN 1-895636-15-9.

Maureen Moran
Brunel University

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BC Bookworld Autumn 2005

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