Heads You Lose (Not Heads Will Roll, as I kept calling it, which is a Yeah Yeah Yeahs song)

AUTHOR(S): Lisa Lutz and David Hayward (although Lutz never hesitates to confirm that SHE is the lead author)

PUBLISHED: 2011

GENRE: Crime thriller

Warning: Bad language ahead.  The author’s, not mine.  I would never use bad language.*

Heads You Lose is, on its face, a pretty typical crime thriller.  Lacey and Paul are twenty-something siblings living in their childhood home, growing weed and laying low.  Until a headless body gets dumped on their lawn.  Given their profession – which is a badly kept secret among the community, given that most of them are customers, but still – the siblings choose to dump the body in the forest instead of calling the cops.  But, much like the proverbial cat in the hat, it comes back the very next day.

What’s different about Heads You Lose is that it’s written by two authors – but not in tandem.  Lutz reached out to Hayward (apparently there’s some history there, if you know what I mean, which will come as no surprise to anyone who reads this thing) and proposed this: Lutz would write the odd chapters and Hayward, the evens.  More interestingly, they would not edit each other’s chapters and would not share storyline notes, meaning neither would know where the other was going.  Hayward might set up a new character, intent on him being the killer, only to have Lutz kill him in the next chapter.

We know all these because of these author interludes in between each chapter, and the snarky footnotes that appear occasionally (i.e., “Hmmm.  Does the cat really need a back story?”).  The interludes are full of raw emotion, far more real than anything in this book or, actually, most others.  Lutz harps on Hayward relentlessly about his language, characters, and lack of movement.  Hayward reacts with ever more passive aggressiveness, which results in a 2 and a half page Dick-and-Jane chapter (“Terry was cutting the pretty plants.  Cut, cut, cut, went the scissors”), to which Lutz responds with this.  To quote:

My thoughts, in chronological order.  1. Fuck you.  2. Seriously, fuck you.  3. I wonder what John Vorhaus is up to these days.  I never did call him.  4.  What was I thinking collaborating with an unpublished, narcissistic poet?  5. We’ve sunk three months into this and there’s still a mystery to solve.

See what I mean about the emotion?

The ending is kind of lame, but the rest of it is fairly interesting, especially watching how the two parts come together as one.  But the interludes remain the absolute best part of it.  It takes a lot of courage to put that all out there like that, and I don’t think they could ever recreate it.  And that’s reason enough to read it.

LENGTH: 301 pages

MAINSTREAM OR NOT: The crime stuff, yes.  The rest of it, no.

SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: Yes, if only for the pure emotion between the authors.  That is some crazy sh- I mean, stuff.

*And if you believe that I have a bridge to sell you.