Thursday, June 9, 2022

Books: COFFEE, SHOPPING, MURDER, LOVE

Despite everything you know and value, Carlos Allende’s new novel COFFEE, SHOPPING, MURDER, LOVE (Red Hen Press; June 21, 2022) will make you root for its bitter, spectacularly superficial, and highly immoral protagonists. The story is both an experiment in empathy and a savagely camp, relentlessly unsentimental, incisive account of our worst impulses and our current deranged political moment. It’s a brilliant, laugh-out-loud work of dark comedy.


Set in Los Angeles, a year before same-sex marriage became legal, the novel follows the misadventures of two gay men for whom it didn’t get better: Jignesh Amin, an overweight, angry Indian-American working as a bookkeeper, and Charlie Hayworth, a socially inept white guy from Leitchfield, Kentucky. After Jignesh murders the beautiful office intern because she insults his writing, and Charlie starts dating Jignesh because he wrongly believes he’s rich, the two men embark on a madcap journey that includes a few other deaths, a money-laundering scheme, a gay cruise, and an ass-backward trip to Los Cabos, Mexico. 


COFFEE, SHOPPING, MURDER, LOVE will leave you cackling while also weeping at what shame does to the psyche, how social media demolishes the spirit, and how much fun it is to conjure abject moral decrepitude.