Willy Vlautin

From GoodReads/Amazon: Barely thirty, Lynette is exhausted. Saddled with bad credit and juggling multiple jobs, some illegally, she’s been diligently working to buy the house she lives in with her mother and developmentally disabled brother Kenny. Portland’s housing prices have nearly quadrupled in fifteen years, and the owner is giving them a good deal. Lynette knows it’s their last best chance to own their own home—and obtain the security they’ve never had. While she has enough for the down payment, she needs her mother to cover the rest of the asking price. But a week before they’re set to sign the loan papers, her mother gets cold feet and reneges on her promise, pushing Lynette to her limits to find the money they need.

Set over two days and two nights, The Night Always Comes follows Lynette’s frantic search—an odyssey of hope and anguish that will bring her face to face with greedy rich men and ambitious hustlers, those benefiting and those left behind by a city in the throes of a transformative boom."

From me: oh, Lynette. No happy endings. So much struggle and so little in return. Are there any answers to these problems? Great story.… (más)

Bleak, sad story of people who can not catch a break. Freddie McCall is broke and broken by the horrible life he leads, unable to think of a way to get free of his mountain of debt and his nightmare-fuel jobs. Leroy is a comatose patient who is locked in his own head where he's decided to go into a fictional world he created to keep from going insane.

The intersection of his horrible past, his tormented present, and Freddie's late-capitalist dysfunction that only barely resembles a life is through the care home where they sort-of exist in juxtaposition. Pauline, a downtrodden nurse and caregiver to a deeply terrible father, winds her way down grocery store aisles as she creates and completes checklist after checklist. No one is getting out of here whole, or even necessarily alive.

Author Vlautin, a musician by trade, eschews song-type restrictions on his prose for a maximalist moment-by-moment account of each character's separate bad-dream life. The accumulation of detail and the internal lives of these average people build a crooked, ramshackle story-verse that each is unaware that they share with the others.

Be aware that there is no redemptive arc or happy resolution in this breathtakingly honest and unsparing portrait of non-essential people doing essential work, then suffering for wanting more than the bare minimum that they can claw out of the filth and decay around them. It's a hard story but a beautiful book.… (más)

Abandoned by his mother, orphaned of his father, 15-year old Charley sets on a journey across America to find his aunt, the only remaining relative who can possibly offer him a better life. He is accompanied on this journey by a horse he befriends (and steals) - Lean on Pete.

Willie Vlautin's "road novel" is recounted in the first-person. Charley's narrative voice uses simple words to devastating effect. This is a tale which skirts the depths of despair and yet finds hope flowering in the most unexpected of places.… (más)