DaveWells.us

Hook Man speaks Matt Clark
Berkley Books 2001World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder

Leg­ends gen­er­ally have a basis in fact, but what about urban leg­ends? Matt Clark explores this idea via Leonard Gage, his one-handed/one-hooked pro­tag­o­nist. Gage is a fairly reg­u­lar guy, except for his metal pros­the­sis and his pen­chant for hid­ing in the bushes near known make-out spots. He’s not an escaped felon, he’s never hurt any of the cou­ples he’s spied upon, and he’s cer­tainly never left his hook planted in the pas­sen­ger door of anyone’s car. He is, how­ever, the liv­ing, breath­ing inspi­ra­tion for the Hook Man urban legend.

Leonard reads an arti­cle about his leg­end, and writes to the author to set the story straight. The author, a folk­lorist named Brauti­gan, decides to study Leonard, his life, and the dis­tri­b­u­tion of his urban leg­end. Dr. Brauti­gan becomes obsessed with the Hook Man, and starts sneak­ing up on parked cou­ples while hold­ing a plas­tic hook. Through­out his life, Leonard runs into other peo­ple who have spawned urban leg­ends. Most of the time, they turn out to be fairly nor­mal peo­ple like him — it’s other peo­ple who are the weird ones.

In this book, Matt Clark has man­aged to strike a good bal­ance between hilar­i­ous and touch­ing. His char­ac­ters are delight­fully quirky, and his writ­ing style is clever and a plea­sure to read. Sadly, this is Clark’s only novel — he suc­cumbed to can­cer at an early age. He was appar­ently a pro­lific writer of short sto­ries, though. I’d like to get my hands on some of them.