Reviewed by David Blaine
In Scott C. Rogers’ Celluloid Cowboy you have the story of how Billy Martin, a student of literature, grows a set and comes of age. All in six days. All in Detroit, Michigan.
This book is a classic page-turner. Among many other things, Rogers really knows how to advance a plot. Some of the supporting characters are just that, characters, almost caricatures. By page 14 Billy is attacked by a midget Mexican wielding a Samurai sword! And Billy’s ride is a not-very-classic 1975 AMC Gremlin, in about the condition you’d expect a 35 year old car to be.
With a bent for reading Keats and his preference for Henry Miller over Arthur Miller, Billy is hardly an amalgam of every white, thirty something male in Detroit. Still, he’s got a personality that should make everyone to want to cheer for him.
If you’re not from Michigan you may not recognize all the place names in the story. You might not know if “The Southfield” is a men’s club or a museum. (Actually, it’s a major freeway in Detroit.) And the DIA, well, anyone could get lucky and guess Detroit Institute of Art. But those points won’t hold up the reading of this book, not with people getting attacked by dogs, shot at and missed, and shit at and hit.
There are a couple of sub plots woven into the book, but they involve people related to Billy and whose lives affect Billy. As you might imagine with a setting in Detroit, people are getting murdered, drug deals are going down, and the employment picture sucks.
Rogers is able to get the feeling of this all down without driving you to suicidal depression. The ending may not be best described as happy, but there is a resolution.
By the time you get to page 160, it’s Monday, things that needed to be resolved have been, and Billy has good cause to hope in the coming weeks and years.
Celluloid Cowboy
by Scott C. Rogers
160 pp Paperback
$14.95 (You can get a signed copy from the publisher.)
ISBN 978-0-615-26110-2
Published by Black Coffee Press LLC
http://www.blackcoffeepress.net
Nice. The “Southfield” is a bitch of a highway, and I was involved in the worst auto accident of my life on that thin stretch of hell. Does the author mention the “Lodge” as well? May be worth reading, being from Michigan and spending some years in the D.