Daniel is a hard man in a hard world of brutal sports and even more brutal labour. He made his way for a time in the cages of fringe MMA fights. He met Sarah and they had a girl, Madelyn, and he discovered his heart of gold. But he’s had to make ends meet and that, for a time, meant doing some mean work for Clayton, a figure as menacing as he is manipulative. Sometimes life just won’t work a clean furrow no matter how much heart and soul you put into it. So it seems almost inevitable that what started in violence is going to end in violence.

Hardcastle is a fine writer. He’s got a distinctive style of sentence fragments and wistfulness, half Hemingway, half Cormac McCarthy. His earlier short stories gave plenty of evidence that if he ever turned his hand to the longer form, he would undoubtedly craft something memorable. And this he has done. It’s not a world I fully recognize other than as a reflection of violent films or through McCarthy’s even more gruesome fiction, but it just might be real. As real as any other fictional world. I certainly believed it. Even though the writing loses something, I think, when it moves from the short form to the long form that seems to demand a roundedness, a completion than can more easily be set aside by Hardcastle in his short stories.

It is a solid debut novel and Kevin Hardcastle will undoubtedly be one to watch in future.

Recommended. ( )