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Motel graciously illuminated by flickering neon light (symbolic image)
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For 21-year-old Alice O'Farrell, every day starts the same way: with a hangover. With that moment of total disorientation, before the headache starts pounding and the stomach decides if the little she ate will stay in. Alice has even developed her own rating system for the intensity of her hangover: from one ("the emotional hangover that came from not drinking enough the night before") to five ("the skull cracker ... every quick movement, every fit of smoker's cough was torture"). But for this one morning, Alice has to expand her scale extremely: she wakes up naked in a neglected trailer, next to her the corpse of her sleazy boss, a bar owner who sells drugs on the side.
This catastrophic morning is the prelude to »Die Schuld«, the first crime novel published in German by US author Samuel W. Gailey. The fact that he has already been compared to literary giants such as Cormac McCarthy and John Steinbeck in his home country is, of course, an exaggeration. Nevertheless, there is a great talent for storytelling to be discovered in »The Guilt«.
Slapstick scene of violence
For his broken heroine, the alcoholic Alice, the day will have even more unpleasant surprises in store: No sooner has she fortified herself with plenty of vodka from the dead man's stash than two gangsters appear in the trailer and take her to task. It's about drugs and a bag with $91,000. Alice is rescued by two cops – and manages to escape with the money after a shootout in which everyone else dies. Gailey creates an almost slapstick-like scene of violence here, which could have come from a film by the Coen brothers, such as "Fargo" or the brutal "No Country for Old Men".
Many of the set pieces in »The Guilt« belong to the familiar crime standards – the bag full of money that everyone is after, the woman whose life is threatened by sinister villains – but what elevates Gailey's novel far above the genre average is the profundity and ambivalence of its characters. First and foremost is Alice, the young woman who has been plagued by feelings of guilt ever since she was supposed to take care of her little brother six years earlier and didn't, so he died in a bizarre accident.
Since then, she has been trying to drown in whiskey and vodka the memory of that evening, of the kawumm, kawumm of the washing machine in which her brother had accidentally locked himself. Like »Alice in Wonderland«, she has to cope with a strange and strange world from now on – with the difference that the world of this modern Alice consists of sleazy strip bars and dingy motels, cheap booze and abusive guys. A world straight out of a particularly sad country song, mercifully lit by flickering neon lights, but actually shabby and broken.
While Alice is on her way to meet Elton, an older man who has helped her before, she is hunted down by a bizarre, unlikely pair of gangsters: the diminutive dealer Sinclair, whose good manners and polite manners can hardly hide his unscrupulousness, and Philip, his driver and man for the rough, a gigantic killer with a childlike disposition.
Gailey never leaves any doubt that the two will eventually find Alice. But before it comes to the inevitable and then completely surprising final confrontation, Gailey dives into the psyche of his characters. All of them, the good and the bad, are merely lost, driven by guilt, in search of redemption. The plot gives the novel its structure, but the tension comes from the development of the characters – whether they teach us fear like Sinclair or whether we fear and hope with them like with Alice.
"All good things come to an end, but bad things can last forever," Sinclair says when the two finally meet. In the end, Alice has to answer herself whether he is right. In order to survive, she has to find herself.