A Time of Predators

A Cautionary Tale of Escalation and Revenge

A Time of Predators by Joe Gores was his first novel, winning him an Edgar Award.

It is a rollercoaster ride of revenge and remorse.

Synopsis

A throwaway comment made in fun about a homosexual pick-up up sends four youths on a gay bashing trip. The assault spins away unchecked and leaves a young father blind.

Paula Halstead is unlucky enough to catch a glance of the ring leader. The thugs track her down and gang-rape her into silence. After they are through, she kills herself.

Her husband, a flabby, middle-aged Stanford University professor, seeks retribution.

Review

Joe Gores tells a nasty little story of stupid actions and their rampant escalation. Whilst at its heart, this is a simple revenge story, Gores rolls it out deftly. Perspectives alternate between the thugs and the professor. He depicts the parallel views of events, drawing out the anxiety as both sides realise that the affair has grown way out of proportion.

Gores’s use of words is sparse to the point of leanness; he never uses two words when one will do. His style gives his writing a page-turning urgency that is tense and absorbing. His depiction of the arrogance of the teenage gang leader is brutal and chilling.

The sexual politics of the book are dated, Gores wrote it in the late 1960s, but the writing isn’t explicit. Gores doesn’t delight in bloodshed and revenge. Instead, he plays on the psychological drama of the inescapable knock-on of events.

The final scenes are psychologically grisly, leaving you wondering if revenge is ever clever. Who is the predator, the hunter or the prey?

Excerpt

“You ever had a guy try to queer you?” asked Rick Dean idly.

Rick was nineteen, lean and dark and intense, with a Barrymore profile. Sitting in the front seat of Heavy Gander’s 1956 Chevy station wagon, he turned so the remark would include the two in back as well as Heavy. One of them, Champ Mather, worked his big callused hands and frowned with the effort of expressing himself.

“Christ, Rick, a guy do that to me, I . . . I’d break his neck.”

“Well, it happened to me,” said Rick, suddenly moody. His dark eyes stared at the cars straggling from the broad V-shaped lot of the drive-in movie. “It was two years ago, I was just a junior in high school and really dumb. I was walking home from this movie, see, and this guy came along and asked if I minded company.”

He stopped, as if realizing that the lights of a car swinging toward the exit might show the tautness of his features, and tipped up his beer can. They had drunk three six-packs during the movie. Since Champ Mather was twenty-one, he could buy it for them legally.

“Then, as soon as we got on a side street, he reached right over and groped me! Right there on the sidewalk!”

The boy beside him stirred. Heavy Gander fit his nickname, for he was obese and sweating under his light windbreaker. Merely because he was behind the wheel, his belly was jammed up tight against it.

“So what’d you do, Rick?”

A Time of Predators by Joe Gores