I remember reading Smoke City's synopsis and thinking that it reminded me a little bit of Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim: The L.A. setting, the supernatural elements, a middle-aged man drinking his sorrows and kicking ass... and getting his ass kicked more often than not. This book ended up being so much more.

Marvin Deitz is the latest reincarnation of Joan of Arc's executioner, Geoffroy Thérage, and he looks for redemption any way he can. He is about to lose his store, and his therapist just broke the tacit understanding between them that she should not openly call him delusional. But it's O.K., he is soon going to die and be reincarnated again, anyway. That's his curse.
That is until he sees a young woman on TV pretending to be the reincarnation of Joan of Arc, sending him on a race against the clock towards Los Angeles. He is picked up by an old van driven by Mike Vale – former world-renowned painter who hasn't touched a brush in years after spiraling into alcohol, bad decisions and depression –, himself on his way to L.A. for his ex-wife's funeral.

Meanwhile, ghosts (or “Smokes”) appear all around the world and seem to be stuck in their own time loops. Why are they here, what do they want, do they even want something ? We don't know, we may never know.

So, how does Keith Rosson manage to juggle with so many plot-points without it looking like a mess? Beautifully, I'd say. Smoke City is a strange road-trip with alternative POVs, mostly between Marvin and Mike (I really like the use of different pronouns, “I” for Marvin's POV and “He” for Mike's), as we follow and learn more about the characters and where they're coming from.
It is also a book about sorrow, grief, redemption, friendship and forgiveness. Most of all, I love how real and raw the characters feel, it's hard to describe but let's just say that many tears were shed while reading this book.

Plot-wise, it's definitely the craziest book I've read in 2017. But it's also one of the best, the kind of character-driven book that really makes you feel beyond the craziness. What a drive!

There is a lot I enjoyed about this book. I liked the artist plot line - especially the difficulty with galleries. I also really like the Joan of Arc plot line. I've already recommended it to friends whose interests line up well with the topics.

Smoke City is a wonderfully unusual book that is a bit hard to pin down or categorize. It has underlying themes of guilt, redemption, penance, forgiveness, and despair. It has a story that spans centuries, beginning with the childhood memories of the executioner who lit the flame in 1431 when he burned the Maid of Orleans - aka Joan of Arc - at the stake. Though that was his career, what could come of killing the embodiment of goodness and light on Earth? What possible penance could ever be enough? How he can he ever find forgiveness? For six hundred years, he has suffered the curse of his grievous sin and been reborn over and over again, never getting absolution.

It’s also a buddy road trip story following in the wake of Kerouac and Neal Cassidy travels, seeing America in a broken van picking up Hitchhikers and stowaways. Marvin Dietz is the hitchhiker, a record store owner in Portland whose obsession with seeking Joan’a forgiveness for his sins in his past life earn him a seat on his psychiatrist’s couch till he sees a porn star on daytime tv declare that she’s posssed by Joan of Arc’s spirit. His erstwhile partner in crime is drunken loser Mike Vale, once the world’s most promising young artist, now condemned to asking customers if they’d like fries with that and on a mission to make peace with his ex-wife or her spirit perhaps.

And, on top of this cavalcade of wounded spirits, we get apparitions or ghosts or smokes, appearing seemingly randomly along freeways and in vacant lots, scaring the crap out of people. Hollywood is now Smoke City.

Smoke City is crazy. Not at all like what you’d expect.

5 stars

In this novel, we meet Mike Vale who was once a world-famous artist whose works sold for millions of dollars. Some years later he has become an alcoholic who hasn’t painted in years. We also meet Marvin Dietz who is in the process of being evicted by his suspected mob-connected landlord. His therapist is worried about him and he is delusional and imagines that he is the reincarnation of Geoffroy Therage. Geoffroy is the man who met Joan of Arc only once – on the day he executed her in France.

Mike is on his way to Los Angeles to attend his ex-wife’s funeral when he picks up Marvin. Marvin wants to journey there to meet a woman who calls herself Joan of Arc. He finds Mike’s picking him up as a portent.

As they drive through California on their way to LA, the landscape is being populated with “smokes” ghost-like apparitions that have begun to appear all over the Southwestern US.

This is a story about friendship and two men looking for redemption. The reader is sent on an empathic journey as they make their way to Los Angeles.

Keith Rosson draws pictures with words. His use of the English language is beautiful. The reader was in the car with Mike and Marvin – literally. I liked the characters in all their tortured glory. They were heroes in their own way. This book was so differently written that at first I had trouble thinking about what exactly to write about it. But it is wonderful, engaging and uniquely interesting. I was drawn to it. This book is very different from the other book of his that I’ve read, Mercy of the Tide.

I want to thank NetGalley and Meerkat Press, LLC for forwarding to me a copy of this most remarkable book to read and enjoy.