By Craig Austin.
Richard John Parfitt, Stray Dogs (Third Man Books, 2023)
Richard John Parfitt spent his teenage years living in Toronto, having emigrated with his family from the urban South Wales sprawl into which he was born. An ‘out of the frying pan into the deep-fat fryer’ trade-off that led to him dropping out of school, running errands for local hustlers, hawking junk remaindered dictionaries, and witnessing Bowie perform live as the Thin White Duke. Experiences that first planted the (demon) seeds for Stray Dogs, a hard-bitten debut novel steeped in the greasy meat of the city’s downtown Sin Strip at the tail-end of the 1970s. A menacing bygone shadow-world of titty-bars, obscene phone calls, and pissing in the street.
Plunged into this stagnant pool, the newly arrived William Turner, along with his friends Millboy and Frankie, soon find themselves off the rails and on the run — armed only with a fairground water pistol and a trunk full of unreliable leather-bound dictionaries — on a chaotic blood-spattered road-trip. One in which the kids flee from a local con-artist, a terrifying biker gang, the spectre of a dead Hell’s Angel who is stabbed in the skull ‘by accident’ — a knife stuck out of his head ‘like a clockwork key’ — and ultimately, themselves. A scattergun spree in which the author grabs the sonic cinema of Springsteen’s Thunder Road by the lapels and smashes it face-first through The Boss’s windshield. There’s no heaven waiting down on the tracks for Turner and his friends, there’s only hell.
And cinematic this book is. A neo-noir thriller with surrealistic flourishes worthy of David Lynch himself: ‘You jerk off to a fuckin eye?’, Millboy asks, when confronted with a one-eyed motelier who keeps his erstwhile peeper in a milky jar. A man who is prone to holding the eye in one hand, while ‘recollecting’ with the other. It’s just one of a series of hard-boiled zingers that punctuate the darkness with fleeting moments of comic levity: the tail of a shirt that pokes out of a zipper ‘like a tiny dick’, a gut that hangs over a waistband ‘like a 4-litre bag of fresh milk’, a hoodlum with his name written not just on the back of his jacket, but ‘on his face too’.
Parfitt’s evocation of time and of place is switchblade-sharp. A half-remembered hinterland, maybe, but one that only the passage of time and its attendant flourishes is truly capable of conjuring up: young spines hunched over pinball machines, fevered fingers playing Cat’s Cradle in the firelight, Baskin & Robbins as a life-changing delicacy. An era during which urban bogeymen, either real or imaginary, cast a sinister spell over the towns and cities that summoned them up. Not that Liverpool’s ‘Purple Aki’, or Birmingham’s ‘Piss-Troll’, can ever hope to compete with the author’s sulphurous ‘Douchebag of Toronto’ — a greasy-haired flasher, a cat killer, a man with ‘black eyeballs’ and a ‘potato nose’.
Where this novel excels is in its authentic capture of the teenage voice, the wanton recklessness of youth, and the crippling insecurities it so often comes packaged with. At his former school, Turner silently observes students who display ‘a confidence I could not relate to and was resentful of. They seemed to know where they were going in a world that was made just for them’. An achievement underpinned by the feral 70s autonomy afforded to Turner, Millboy, and Frankie, by parents who seem, at best, distant, and, at worst, hostile. Turner has a ‘mother’, though fickle and transient, but there are no other ‘Moms’ and ‘Dads’ in this story. Just a series of Rays, Kathys, and those unknown. ‘I could have remembered her as if she were Joan of Arc’, Turner says of his mother – ‘instead of the two words Ray used when she left’. Frankie’s mum, Kathy, by way of contrast, is a dancer in a strip club where you could see her ‘shake it for five bucks’ on a Wednesday afternoon. ‘My father didn’t give me anything’, Millboy says, in a quietly heartbreaking passage—– ‘not even a name’.
It’s lines such as these, devastating in their simplicity, that will stay with you for weeks to come. You would be excused for wanting to take a long shower after reading this book — a real rain, to wash all this scum off perhaps — but it would be worth it. Its method of seduction may be brutal, but Stray Dogs is a thrill-ride that merits the price of the ticket.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Craig Austin is a London-based writer and critic. He has written for numerous publications including Wales Arts Review, The Lonely Crowd, and The Modernist magazine. His short fiction has most recently been published in New Towns: An Anthology of Place Writing and Home to You: 10 Years of Wales Arts Review. He has just finished writing his debut novel.
