Loser Baby
by Jason Bovberg
August 1-31, 2021 Tour
Synopsis:
Jasmine Frank is missing.
It’s a humid summer morning in Santa Ana, California, and her twin brother Jordan abruptly finds himself on a desperate search—fearing the worst. The party last night got way out of hand, and his brain is still chemically fried. But this is Jasmine’s story. She’s awakened far from home to her own mystery: She’s unwittingly stolen something from the most dangerous person she’s ever known. Tommy Strafe. And now Tommy is raging through the sunbaked streets, gathering illicit forces to seek brutal retribution. But all Jasmine really wants is to get out of Orange County, escape her past, and find a measure of redemption.
Loser Baby is a propulsive blast through the streets of the SoCal melting pot, a breakneck dark-comic neo-noir populated by misfits and malefactors, criminals and innocents, down-and-outers and spun-out dreamers. Prepare yourself for an adrenaline rush of rat-a-tat he-said-she-said narrative twists—all in service of a giddily slam-bang shock ending.
Book Praise:
“Jason Bovberg’s Loser Baby is a beautiful noir novel for the 21st century! It’s a wild, frantic ride through shady Southern California, a desperate drug-fueled search for a girl who only wants to escape a sordid life.”
—Scott Phillips, author of THE ICE HARVEST and THAT LEFT TURN AT ALBUQUERQUE
“Loser Babyis the real deal for hardcore crime fiction fans. This one grinds with the engine over the red line all the way. Hang on tight!”
—Eric Beetner, author of ALL THE WAY DOWN
“Loser Baby is one cool book! Bovberg writes characters who get into your head and under your skin. You won’t shake this one easily: It’ll stay with you long after you read it!”
—Terrill Lee Lankford, author of SHOOTERS and ANGRY MOON
“Jason Bovberg’s Loser Baby is a high-octane thriller that moves like greased lightning! The beauty of this book is its motley collection of despicable characters whom you come to love by the end. Loser Baby is Bovberg’s greatest book and one of the best of the year.
—Gary Phillips, author of BLOOD AND ASPHALT and BIRDS OF FIRE
Book Details:
Genre: Suspense
Published by: Dark Highway Press
Publication Date: August 2nd 2021
Number of Pages: 322
ISBN: 9780966262988
Purchase Links: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads
Read an excerpt:
0 Jasmine
Smack in the middle of Santa Ana on a Friday night, gang-funk psychedelia, the animal snarl and faint butane odor of nitrous-juiced import cars, the streets undulating and ratcheting like a grungy arcade game—rumble, whoosh, clickety-clack. The city was still new to Jasmine Frank, this sprawling expanse of damp concrete, swaying palms, salty beach sweat, and steaming antifreeze. The japchae and the spicy fish tacos and the pulsating afro grooves, the cackling Chicano rap, the cacophony of indecipherable shouts coming at her along Westminster Boulevard—yes! She got off on the staccato ghetto thrill of it all, closing her eyes, lost in the jagged rhythms, the music and the traffic, crisscrossing like a spastic radio dial. A constantly moving mobile night life.
Sooooo different from what she and Jordy were used to back home in that deadened whitebread cul-de-sac, north Garden Grove. In their new life, it felt as if there were raging pool parties around every cinder-block corner, drugs and condoms handed out like candy, cool kids as far as the eye could see. Plenty of assholes, too, but who cared about them? You just ignored them, and they went away, bothered someone else.
Jordy’s voice whispered hot in her ear, but he wasn’t in the car with her now, he was back at Tommy’s party. She couldn’t catch her brother’s words. It was as if they were buffeting on the humid wind outside her window. Or maybe she didn’t want to hear him. She tuned him out, left him back at Tommy’s house. She laughed at that, then felt a little bad. Just a little.
The inside of the car looked new—it even had a spiffy aftermarket audio deck with a touchscreen—but it was an older ride, some kind of Volkswagen according to the steering wheel. The driver (what was his name, again?) had let her thumb down her window to let the night in. She’d made him turn off his USB stick full of sugary pop right away, in favor of the nightsong. The hazy world swirled, and her body with it. She grooved in the contoured seat.
Jasmine glanced over at the dude, caught him ogling her legs, which she knew looked fabulous beneath the hem of her blue dress. His gaze both mortified and delighted her. Dude was OK looking but nothing special, and of course she knew what he was after. But she aimed higher, deserved better. Deserved more. That’s what Jordy told her, and that’s what her mom used to say, too.
Hell, the guy was good for a ride, anyway.
“How much farther, my duuuuude?” she sang out, full-throated, and she swore she could see her voice splay out colorfully and blast out the window into the night.
LOL, she thought, like actually conjuring the individual letters. She giggled, loving it. What’s wrong with me?
“Few miles,” he said, smirk-voiced.
He was wearing a silly dark fedora that he thought made him look sophisticated or something, but she knew it was only there to hide his thinning hair. She remembered him from the vitamin store a few days ago, when this all started. He was harmless, like a puppy dog. If you’d told her then that she’d end up alone with him, shotgun in his VW a few days later, high as shitballs, rushing through the late-late Santa Ana night in search of burgers, she’d have laughed in your face. Nice eyes, though. A good set of blue eyes could take a guy a long way.
She found herself balling up her fists and drumming the dash and screaming, “Fuuuuuck iiiiiiiit!”
Holy crap, something was in her system, gooey and euphoric, making her feel as if her head was twisting up and away like some fancy warm firecracker. Everything exaggerated, everything spinning out, like just now this hopped-up neon-yellow Toyota ahead of them, its tires chirping on the concrete of the intersection, couple of teenagers’ hands waving frantically out the sunroof. Heading toward the beach, probably, the bonfires, the giddy drunken dancing at the shore. Jasmine squealed laughter, wanting to go with them.
But she was hungry, Jesus Christ! Whooaaa hooooooo!
Food first.
“Well, hurry up, then!” she said nonsensically, realizing after she said it that she was responding to whatever the driver said a few minutes ago.
They were stopped at a light, and she was tapping her foot.
“This probably isn’t the greatest idea, you know,” he said, right hand resting on his short-throw gearshift. “Tommy’s gonna be pissed. At both of us.”
“Jeez, man, you’re bringin’ me down.”
“You don’t want Tommy pissed at you.”
“Awww, he’s a big ol’ softie.”
“I’m serious.”
“He’s cool.”
He gave her a look. “Girl, you’re thinkin’ of someone else.”
“Sheesh, I’ve known Tommy forever.”
“Be that as it may, you don’t—”
“Hold up, did you just say, ‘Be that as it may’?”
A pause. “Shut up.”
Jasmine started laughing so hard that she could barely breathe. After a while, her leaking eyes opened blurrily on the car next to them, and she saw a large Hispanic man staring at her as if he couldn’t figure her out. That was fine with her. She waved goofily at the dull-faced man, and then he pulled away when the light turned green. A few moments later, someone passed them in an underlit red Subaru WRX, sound system booming, windows tinted so black that it was like looking into the devil’s eyes. The rally car swerved liquidly around the traffic ahead of them and was gone as if it had never been.
“Oooooh,” she breathed.
Her laughter had run its course. It seemed like they were hitting every goddamn signal, and it was harshing her chill.
“What’s your name again?” Lolling her head toward the driver.
“Mark.” He looked annoyed, and that made her start laughing again. “It’s Mark.”
When she caught her breath, she said, sighing, “Let’s fetch those burgers and then go right back to Tommy’s, all right, Mark? Sound like a plan? If I don’t get something to eat, I’m gonna faint dead away.”
Jasmine hardly knew what she was coming out of her mouth. She sounded like her mom, she realized distantly. Every once in a while she’d blink hard and fall into a clarity gap in which she could curse Tommy and that guy who’d given her the pills, Derek, the weirdo with the tats. She was surprised Jordy’d let that guy get within twenty feet of her. But shit, who cared, she felt gooooood. Although she could sense that she was approaching the end of it—fuck!
She gripped the straps of her purse tightly, like holding on to the lapbar at the top of one of the insane rollercoasters at Magic Mountain, way up I-5, north of Los Angeles. That’s what she felt like right now. She remembered her mom taking her and Jordan up there to Valencia years ago, blitzing on so many goddamn coasters and so much candy and funnel cake that they’d felt nauseated and lightheaded for days after. That was before Karl came into the picture, before the fun drained out of the world.
The purse straps felt funny. Slippery. She glanced down and found she was holding on to a Safeway grocery bag. It was heavy.
Whatever.
But then all of a sudden, beneath the chemical bliss of whatever she’d ingested, her throat was raw, and she felt like crying. It was as if she were catching intermittent glimpses of an abyss that was beneath her at all times. The sensation was all wrapped up in Jordy, her twin brother who she both loved and hated, and what they’d done months ago. Sometimes she knew for sure that they’d made the right decision and were on their way to a future that meant something—like, absolutely. Other times, she was certain that there was no future, at least along this path … and nothing but doom lay on the horizon.
And now she knew she’d done something extra stupid, and she was heading toward an immediate future she wasn’t prepared for at all. She knew these things, but her body wouldn’t let her feel their full import. It left her fingers sweaty and shaking, barely holding on to this slippery Safeway bag. She pictured her mother’s face, and then the tears were closer than ever. She felt as if her lips were on the verge of murmuring—Mommy.
“Here it is, coming up on the left,” Mark said. “Yeah, I can definitely go for a Double-Double. This was a good call.”
Jasmine perked up, leaned forward, took a look around, wanting to squeeze every last drop of whatever was vibrating in her veins.
Westminster Boulevard seemed abruptly empty now, desolate almost, and it felt like seven hours had passed since she’d gotten in this stranger’s car.
“Where’d everyone go?” she whispered. “I mean, where’d everyone go?”
As the car slowed and eased into the turn lane, Jasmine felt a twitch of hollow nausea, and the eternal abyss—the one that was always beneath her—began to widen. She turned back to the open window, sucked in the night air in huge gasps, forced a beatific smile, tried to lose herself again.
It wasn’t working.
Mark turned into the dark, empty parking lot and immediately began shouting.
Jasmine’s head felt like a gob of Hubba Bubba. She felt Mark’s frustrated temper like a soft pummeling up there, and she brought disembodied hands to her face to massage her temple. Without realizing it, her head had fallen against her door, and she was idly watching the dead-of-night traffic continue to drift down Westminster Boulevard toward the 405 overpass. It was an endless procession of vehicles even at this ungodly hour, and why was she even out here at the edge of nowhere with this Mark person? The Safeway bag was even more slippery now, and it felt wrong in her grip, unnatural, and somewhere deep down she knew she was in trouble because of it.
Mark was still yelling, and now he was asking her a question, a repeated question, but all she could do was listen to the lonely night, the cars and vans and trucks whooooshing past. She closed her eyes, locked onto the repetition, the endless mournful sighs and howls of tires on asphalt, rising and then fading into the distance, one by one. That was really what Santa Ana was all about—a bunch of restless people on the move, all the time, on their way to anywhere else.
Except her.
Except Jasmine Frank.
She would always be here, trapped in SoCal amber, looking outward and yearning for the other side. Even if she found someone to take her to Santa Ana’s edge, like Mark had just done, she’d always be left gazing out into a great unknown, like a fish staring out of a murky bowl, and there’d always be someone yelling at her and telling her what to be or where to go.
As exhaustion began to press down on her, as well as increased nausea, Jasmine’s awareness fractured, and Jordy’s voice came into the mix, and then her mom’s, and she just wanted to go home. Home! Not the little hovel in Santa Ana that she shared with her brother, but her real home, where her mom was, when the world was good and promising.
She lifted her heavy head from the door, and she turned toward Mark.
He stopped yelling abruptly.
“Hey, are you all right? Are you crying?” His expression was one of genuine concern, and she felt a sudden warmth toward him.
“I don’t feel so hot,” she said, smacking her lips with distaste.
“Let’s get you home.”
Every once in a while, someone said just the right thing. Today it was this guy’s turn. Mark. That was his name. The man with the hat.
Jasmine smiled at him.
“Really?”
***
Excerpt from Loser Baby by Jason Bovberg. Copyright 2021 by Jason Bovberg. Reproduced with permission from Jason Bovberg. All rights reserved.
Author Bio:
Jason Bovberg is the author of the Blood trilogy—Blood Red, Draw Blood, and Blood Dawn—as well as The Naked Dame, a throwback pulp noir novel. His forthcoming books include Tessa Goes Down, a border noir, and A Small Poisonous Act, a suburban crime novel. He is editor/publisher of Dark Highway Press, which published the controversial, erotic fairy tale Santa Steps Out and the weird western anthology Skull Full of Spurs.
He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his wife Barb, his daughters Harper and Sophie, and his canines Rocky and Rango. You can find him online at www.jasonbovberg.com.
Q&A with Jason Bovberg
What was the inspiration for LOSER BABY?
I grew up in Southern California in the ’70s and ’80s, from Garden Grove to Santa Ana to Orange to Irvine, and one thing I loved about the area—even back then—was the sprawling, multicultural, car-obsessed, beach-sweat vibe of it all. Music in the air all the time, the wet heat, the swaying palms … it made for a great childhood, especially the summers, body-surfing in the morning, scarfing drive-through burgers for lunch, listening to music while wandering the wide streets. There’s always been a yummy idyllic quality to SoCal, for sure, but there’s also always been a scuzzy underbelly of crime and drugs and lower-class ennui, and that’s what I wanted to explore in LOSER BABY, that dichotomy.
I’ve also always loved vintage pulp fiction, so my primary inspiration was to combine that sense of noir with the sunniness of Orange County’s lowest-brow city, Santa Ana. In essence, contrast the dark with the light.
What has been the biggest challenge in your writing career?
The beginning of it! I was sidelined early thanks to a bout of Hodgkin’s Disease (a type of lymphoma) when I was 19. Man, that really put a dent in my trajectory, and it took a long while to recover. It’s probably for that reason that I feel as if I only started writing seriously late in life. (In fact, a big part of my writing output in my forties was to tackle my feelings about my “cancer period” in my horror trilogy Blood Red, Draw Blood, and Blood Dawn, a collective study of a blood anomaly that threatens existence.)
I’ll occasionally read success stories about writers getting their big break out of college, and that just ain’t me. Maybe I never really had anything exciting to write about back then, or I didn’t know the right people, but only now—past 50—do I feel like I have some really good, fun stuff to share. Now I’m facing a new challenge: finding an audience. And in the end, that may be the biggest challenge of all.
What do you absolutely need while writing?
Music! And I don’t mean songs with lyrics. Lyrics get all jumbled up with the words flowing out of my head. What I require are instrumental pieces, and my favorites of those are soundtracks. While writing LOSER BABY, I kept going back to propulsive film scores like Ennio Morricone’s The Untouchables and John Williams’ Raiders of the Lost Ark. I also love putting on some instrumental jazz, my favorites being by people like Sidney Bechet.
Do you adhere to a strict routine when writing or write when the ideas are flowing?
When I have a book in progress, I stick to a routine of a thousand words per day. Sometimes those thousand words pour out in a couple hours, and sometimes I have to exhaustively yank them out one lousy letter at a time, and it takes all day. But I don’t give myself a break if it’s tough. Gotta get those words out! By doing that, I train the mind to get the work done, and over time it has become easier.
I think regular word flow is important, however a writer can manage it. If you have an irregular pace, and you’re taking long breaks between sessions, that’s going to inevitably affect the flow of the narrative, the characterizations, the structure …. You lose momentum. You forget stuff! I wrote LOSER BABY relentlessly, nearly a hundred thousand words, written in a hundred days, and I think that shows in the finished product.
Who is your favorite character from LOSER BABY and why?
I gotta say, the character that has stuck with me the most is a little girl named Sarah, who gets one chapter from her perspective in the middle of the book, and it may be the book’s strongest emotional punch. She’s really the book’s only true innocent, and I admit to getting a little choked up writing about her problems in the midst of everything else that went down.
Tell us why we should read LOSER BABY.
LOSER BABY is a timely look at the upcoming generation as much as it calls back to the pulpy traditions of dime-store paperbacks. You might say this is the book I came up with after my daughters went through high school. I got a close look at what these kids are like, mostly the friends they hung out with, and although I saw a lot of flippant, foul-mouthed, social-media influenced narcissism and entitlement—which you’ll see in LOSER BABY—I also saw a lot of opinionated smarts, and powerful interest in justice, and hope for the future. (I wanted my book to touch on those notes, too.) So think of LOSER BABY as both a crime-fiction thrill ride AND a gut-punch of a timely social commentary!
Give us an interesting fun fact or a few about LOSER BABY.
One of the more interesting aspects of LOSER BABY for me is the use of multiple, perhaps unreliable narrators. I wanted to explore a single event—over the course of a single day—from the points of view of many characters. Call it Rashomon meets Jim Thompson! As I drove a pounding, straight-ahead narrative, I also wanted to give all those characters back stories, to flesh them out, and to show how their idiosyncratic histories have affected key plot events from moment to moment, and how they have ultimately impacted the resolution of the story. I know some readers (including my wife!) don’t really like multiple narrators, but I feel strongly that when it’s done RIGHT, a novel told from multiple perspectives can be the very opposite of disorienting. Perspective switching can be strategic, seamless, and even thrilling in and of itself. I think LOSER BABY achieves that.
Do you have anything specific that you want to say to your readers?
There’s recently been a nostalgic renaissance of pulp fiction. I’m talking about those classic, vintage crime paperbacks with the lurid covers. Those books are FANTASTIC (I have a prized collection of them), but what I’m trying to do is use those books as inspiration for a new, more relevant kind of pulp fiction. With LOSER BABY and another book I have in the pipeline, I’m trying to write pulpy page-turners that are pertinent to the day. I want to tackle today’s world but use a retro style.
Tell us a little about yourself and your background.
I’m originally from southern California, where LOSER BABY takes place, but I moved to northern Colorado in the early ’90s because I’m more of a mountain person than a beach person. I also prefer the pace of Colorado.
I fell in love with Fort Collins way back then, everything about it this groovy college town. The place is so idyllic that I wrote a trilogy of apocalyptic horror novels, the BLOOD trilogy, in which I laid waste to it. Around the turn of the millennium, I found work as a writer/editor for a tech publication, where I tinkered with language for fifteen years. When print magazines died, I went freelance for several tech companies, and that’s what I’m still doing. I’ve raised two daughters who are about to enter the world as adults, and I just celebrated twenty-five years married to an awesome lady. Life is good.
What’s next that we can look forward to?
I have two more crime novels on the horizon, actually. The first is TESSA GOES DOWN, what you might call a “border noir” crossed with a “Midnight Run” chase narrative crossed with a race-tinged “One False Move” showdown thriller. For this book, I’ve combined that noir style with the atmosphere of politicized rage and hate out there today. It deals with post-pandemic attitudes, and the bewildering rise of bad guys over the past five years, and how optimism can die if you don’t nurture it on a big scale.
The other book is called A SMALL POISONOUS ACT, and this is my epic suburban crime story. Like LOSER BABY, it plays with multiple points of view, looking at a neighborhood from disparate perspectives. A little girl, an old man, a cheerleader type, a corrupt local businessman. And what happens when a small crime on a tiny suburban cul-de-sac can escalate into something deadly.
Catch Up With Our Author:
JasonBovberg.com
Goodreads
BookBub
Instagram – @jasonbovbergauthor
Twitter – @JasonBovberg
Facebook – @CriminalVintage
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This is a rafflecopter giveaway hosted by Partners in Crime Virtual Book Tours for Jason Bovberg. There will be 1 winner of one (1) Amazon.com Gift Card (U.S. ONLY). The giveaway runs August 1st through September 2, 2021. Void where prohibited.
