Slippin' into Darkness - Softcover

His style is unique, to be sure, but Partridge is in the same ballpark as Joe Lansdale and Ed Gorman -- bright-colored comic book imagery, embattled and flawed protagonists, and a melancholy tone that seeps in around the edges. This story is reminiscent of "Twin Peaks": a sweet, lovely high-school girl stars in a scene of sex and violence that continues to haunt her male classmates long after her death. This time, though, "Laura Palmer" gets her revenge. The prose is vivid and satisfyingly detailed, the characters are crisply delineated, and the mood is like a sad rock-n-roll song with a good backbeat.

Eighteen years after high school, a former cheerleader turned "trailer trash" prostitute kills herself. Shortly thereafter, her ghost (or perhaps just her memory) becomes the focus of a dire set of events involving old classmates, from her admirers to her rival to the jocks who raped her, shattering her life. Their lives changed, too, and not for the better. One's a pornographer, one's a drugged-out insomniac, one changes husbands faster than hairstyles, and all lead meaningless, desperately despondent lives. In the 24 hours the story occupies, what they did and saw and condoned 18 years ago comes home with dreadful but condign intensity. This is a story of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, and it is informed by the spirit and the lyrics of 1970s pop culture. Partridge writes with a rock beat--disco crossed with hard-slammin' punk--that gives the book a savage tempo in keeping with its horrific events. Dennis Winters