Who's your daddy? A review of Christa Faust's Money Shot.
From Sunday, 21 July 2013 through Monday, 22 July 2013, I re-read Christa Faust's Money Shot (London: Hard Case Crime [re-published in electronic format in 2011 by Titan Books, a division of Titan Publishing Group, Ltd.; originally published in mass market paperback in February 2008 -- Hard Case Crime Book Number HCC-040 -- by Dorchester Publishing, NY]; 260 pps.); I originally read it, as a library book, from Saturday, 31 October 2009 through Monday, 2 November 2009.
Christa Faust's Money Shot was an original novel for the Hard Case Crime imprint under its first publisher, that has since been republished by English publisher Titan Books; it's a fun pulp fictional romp with a serious subtext about the role of women in the U.S. that doesn't slide into Andrea Dworkin territory (or "womyn-land": "womyn" because said females want nothing to do with men, even as part of their name).
Ex-porn star and current head of an adult entertainer talent agency Angel Dare (this is her pro name; her agency is called Daring Angels) is tempted into making a cameo appearance in a porno by the request of an old friend named Sam Hammer and the prospect of having some screen time with a hot new stud named Jesse Black, only to find that it was a set-up: apparently an unaffiliated stripper named Lia, who visited Daring Angels looking for an old friend named Lenuta Vasilescu, stage name Zandora Dior, left something of high value at the agency when she fled some thugs. After being tortured, raped, shot and left for dead, Angel calls upon her agency's new security escort, Lalo Malloy, an ex-L.A. cop with a checkered past, to assist her in first surviving, then in administering some righteous payback. Enjoyable and surprisingly gritty genre hijinks ensue, which have some unexpectedly bleak denouements of highly ambiguous morality.
A lot of the enjoyment to be had in Money Shot is due to the fact that the first-person narrator / protagonist is a believable woman: a sex-positive adult entertainer who, while gifted with the obvious skills for her chosen profession as well as some hard-won business acumen, is neither superhumanly competent nor cooly calculating; she's someone who goes through hell, freely admits to breaking under torture, cops to her intimacy issues, and makes no apologies for the sharp turn of events that her emotions (understandably, but again, of dubious ethicality) lead her to. We've read and seen innumerable male tough guys and lowlifes walk these mean streets countless times; it's a sad reflection of the marginalization of women in the hard boiled genre to read or see a convincing female protagonist being put through the same paces, and realize just how comparatively rare a sight it is.
Angel (and, by extension, Faust) are likely to alienate some readers by the vehemence with which she defends the adult entertainment industry. Angel's attitude towards the porn industry, as is made all but explicit by her opening up a talent agency, is "Don't hate the player; hate the game"; by providing a strong female perspective to her clients, Angel feels that she can best help them navigate the numerous pitfalls awaiting the higher-paid on-camera talent (viz. Susan Faludi's 1999 book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man), and either advance within or ultimately escape a business that uses up the vast majority of its workers. (As Angel remarks, in Chapter 16, "A lot of women wound up feeling used by the porn industry, but they were just the ones who never figured out how to use it right back.") The spirited debate that Angel has with Malloy, in Chapter 11, regarding the industry's sly use of many men's desire for sex with adolescents in marketing its videos and websites is interesting, and likely to prove something of a litmus test for the reader: some readers may well abandon the book, or at least their sympathy for Angel, at that point. Still, for all of the explicit, and often humorous, references to the pornographic film industry (such as: "A lot of guys imagine that it would be this big turn-on to visit a porn set. My advice is, unless you really love watching other men jack off, don't bother," in Chapter 15), few passages underscore just how far outside of the mainstream Angel really is better than this line, in Chapter 10: "I had never met a man who actually wore an undershirt under a dress shirt."
Come to that, Angel's a bit more complex a character than many of her male counterparts in the hardboiled genre, as witness her musing, "I couldn't get a fix on how to feel about Malloy. I wanted to slug him and fuck him and get away from him and be rescued by him all at the same time," in Chapter 13. For his part, Malloy too shows intriguing hints that he's more than a mere plot device / slab o' beef, as when he tells Angel, "'The big mistake people make when they do drag is going too far...Overcompensating. Too girly. Too macho. If you want to be believable, you have to keep it simple. Nothing for the eye to catch on,'" in Chapter 14.
My absolutely favorite bit of cultural commentary in Money Shot comes at the beginning of Chapter 18:
"I hate malls. They're like strip clubs for women. All tease and sparkle and the empty promise that if you just drop enough cash, somehow you'll be fulfilled. The slick, shameless, never-ending hustle of a shopping mall makes places like [the strip club] Eye Candy look downright charitable by comparison."
I first read Money Shot in 2009, as a library rental; I liked it well enough so that when Amazon was having a one-day sale on the Kindle versions of 49 Hard Case Crime books for $1.99 apiece, I bought a copy, as well as the sequel, 2011's Choke Hold (which, like Money Shot, also has an amazing cover by Glen Orbik), set in the parallel world of mixed martial arts fighting (think UFC). Oddly enough, I found that I liked Money Shot a lot more the second time around, possibly due to having read Faust's Butch Fatale, Dyke Dick: Double-D Double-Cross (love that title!) in 2013 as my first book read on the Kindle. That, or I've read a lot more crappy books before re-reading it this year than I did before the first time that I read it.
*Cross-posted to LibraryThing.
Christa Faust's Money Shot was an original novel for the Hard Case Crime imprint under its first publisher, that has since been republished by English publisher Titan Books; it's a fun pulp fictional romp with a serious subtext about the role of women in the U.S. that doesn't slide into Andrea Dworkin territory (or "womyn-land": "womyn" because said females want nothing to do with men, even as part of their name).
Ex-porn star and current head of an adult entertainer talent agency Angel Dare (this is her pro name; her agency is called Daring Angels) is tempted into making a cameo appearance in a porno by the request of an old friend named Sam Hammer and the prospect of having some screen time with a hot new stud named Jesse Black, only to find that it was a set-up: apparently an unaffiliated stripper named Lia, who visited Daring Angels looking for an old friend named Lenuta Vasilescu, stage name Zandora Dior, left something of high value at the agency when she fled some thugs. After being tortured, raped, shot and left for dead, Angel calls upon her agency's new security escort, Lalo Malloy, an ex-L.A. cop with a checkered past, to assist her in first surviving, then in administering some righteous payback. Enjoyable and surprisingly gritty genre hijinks ensue, which have some unexpectedly bleak denouements of highly ambiguous morality.
A lot of the enjoyment to be had in Money Shot is due to the fact that the first-person narrator / protagonist is a believable woman: a sex-positive adult entertainer who, while gifted with the obvious skills for her chosen profession as well as some hard-won business acumen, is neither superhumanly competent nor cooly calculating; she's someone who goes through hell, freely admits to breaking under torture, cops to her intimacy issues, and makes no apologies for the sharp turn of events that her emotions (understandably, but again, of dubious ethicality) lead her to. We've read and seen innumerable male tough guys and lowlifes walk these mean streets countless times; it's a sad reflection of the marginalization of women in the hard boiled genre to read or see a convincing female protagonist being put through the same paces, and realize just how comparatively rare a sight it is.
Angel (and, by extension, Faust) are likely to alienate some readers by the vehemence with which she defends the adult entertainment industry. Angel's attitude towards the porn industry, as is made all but explicit by her opening up a talent agency, is "Don't hate the player; hate the game"; by providing a strong female perspective to her clients, Angel feels that she can best help them navigate the numerous pitfalls awaiting the higher-paid on-camera talent (viz. Susan Faludi's 1999 book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man), and either advance within or ultimately escape a business that uses up the vast majority of its workers. (As Angel remarks, in Chapter 16, "A lot of women wound up feeling used by the porn industry, but they were just the ones who never figured out how to use it right back.") The spirited debate that Angel has with Malloy, in Chapter 11, regarding the industry's sly use of many men's desire for sex with adolescents in marketing its videos and websites is interesting, and likely to prove something of a litmus test for the reader: some readers may well abandon the book, or at least their sympathy for Angel, at that point. Still, for all of the explicit, and often humorous, references to the pornographic film industry (such as: "A lot of guys imagine that it would be this big turn-on to visit a porn set. My advice is, unless you really love watching other men jack off, don't bother," in Chapter 15), few passages underscore just how far outside of the mainstream Angel really is better than this line, in Chapter 10: "I had never met a man who actually wore an undershirt under a dress shirt."
Come to that, Angel's a bit more complex a character than many of her male counterparts in the hardboiled genre, as witness her musing, "I couldn't get a fix on how to feel about Malloy. I wanted to slug him and fuck him and get away from him and be rescued by him all at the same time," in Chapter 13. For his part, Malloy too shows intriguing hints that he's more than a mere plot device / slab o' beef, as when he tells Angel, "'The big mistake people make when they do drag is going too far...Overcompensating. Too girly. Too macho. If you want to be believable, you have to keep it simple. Nothing for the eye to catch on,'" in Chapter 14.
My absolutely favorite bit of cultural commentary in Money Shot comes at the beginning of Chapter 18:
"I hate malls. They're like strip clubs for women. All tease and sparkle and the empty promise that if you just drop enough cash, somehow you'll be fulfilled. The slick, shameless, never-ending hustle of a shopping mall makes places like [the strip club] Eye Candy look downright charitable by comparison."
I first read Money Shot in 2009, as a library rental; I liked it well enough so that when Amazon was having a one-day sale on the Kindle versions of 49 Hard Case Crime books for $1.99 apiece, I bought a copy, as well as the sequel, 2011's Choke Hold (which, like Money Shot, also has an amazing cover by Glen Orbik), set in the parallel world of mixed martial arts fighting (think UFC). Oddly enough, I found that I liked Money Shot a lot more the second time around, possibly due to having read Faust's Butch Fatale, Dyke Dick: Double-D Double-Cross (love that title!) in 2013 as my first book read on the Kindle. That, or I've read a lot more crappy books before re-reading it this year than I did before the first time that I read it.
*Cross-posted to LibraryThing.