The Ultimate Rush
Written by Joe Quirk (Rob Weisbach Books/William Morris)
by Thomas Christian
SPEED. Humans are obsessed with it.
Take the case of Chet Griffin; Chet knows the value of speed. He’s the fastest courier messenger in all of San Francisco. Forgoing traditional bicycle transport and opting instead for a pair of rollerblades, Chet zips through traffic, hops trolley cars, and cuts street corners tight like no bicycle courier can. Combining a perfect balance of fine wheel finesse and utter self-recklessness, he’s Hermes on ‘blades, possessing both the tools and the smarts to get the job done: “The first three lights, each in succession, turn yellow. I scorch beneath them as each flares red at the top of my vision and bores between my eyebrows like some Hindu implant.”
Yesireeee, Chet adores speed, genuflecting to its power with the passion of a weightless angel: “Instant hyperspeed… rubber cheeks pulled back and flapping, shins vibrating like jackhammers, eyeballs shaking like ice cubes in a martini shaker.”
At home in an H.R. Giger wallpapered room, he tends to a five foot pet boa constrictor and enjoys listening to noise-rattled Nirvana and the cracked metal rakings of John Coltrane’s OM. Socially, he hangs with friends Denny and Ho. Denny is a wheelchair-bound computer hacker with the capability to plant viruses, incapacitate countries, and generally wreak havoc amongst the citizens of the world. Ho Pixie is a blue-haired, skateboarding, lesbian dynamo, spinning wheels on city sidewalks by day, and club-hopping at night, plunking bass lines at center stage as the lead scream-machine of her punk band Spit.
With his reputation as the speediest courier on the job, Chet gets the cream assignments. One day, while delivering some Top Secret microchip documents to the mysterious Dr. Chen, everything suddenly goes awry, and Chet’s world is turned upside down. He’s framed for a murder he didn’t commit, and wakes the next morning to discover his face on a police sketch plastered all over the city: public enemy number 1. The cops want to arrest him. Citizen vigilantes are out to lynch him. And an army of Uzi-toting mobsters are dispatched with orders to kill him on sight. To further complicate matters, he finds himself helplessly falling in love with Ho: “I don’t know which is eating me up more: the city trying to kill me, or being trapped in a room with an unbearably desirable dyke.” With their blue-haired Rottweiler in tow, the couple sets upon the business of solving the murder and clearing Chet’s good name, even as the fates of opposition mount, sending them crashing through windows, zigging past pedestrians, and dodging laser-tracked Uzi fire: “My mind becomes a 360 degree eye, floating above me like an orb, ascending to the heavens. From the air, San Francisco looks like a cemetery of competing tombstones.”
In this, author Joe Quirk’s debut novel, the fun begins when the music plays, fittingly, “‘Bring the Noise’: Aaaaaah, sweet. White kids in pink and green mohawks are airborne, carving out totally bizotic nose ollies, eggplants, Christ Noldars, and frigid aires. Gravity is dead. The air is alive with flying wizards… Rip, shred, tear, and slash…”
