"Bullets, Booze and Bastards"

Phone Call From Hell & Other Tales of the Damned by Jonathan Woods

Jonathan Woods, author of the award-winning Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem, returns with a new collection of seventeen crazed and corrosively funny noir tales: A corporate raider heads down to Key West for some sport fishing and murder; Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene hit the streets of Havana where both pleasure and danger lurk; a worker in an office tower is seduced by the synthesized female voice in the elevator. Combining the offbeat humor of the Coen brothers with the madness of Jim Thompson, these stories will keep you up ‘til the wee hours. And you won’t go to sleep without a loaded pistol under your pillow.

Raves for Phone Call From Hell & Other Tales of the Damned

“It is a long time since I pulled an all-nighter with a book. Jonathan Woods’ new collection of stories had me up in sheer envy and delight. This is noir as it should be: bleak, funny, dark as sin, in your face, exhilarating!”
—Ken Bruen, award-winning author of The Guards, Blitz, London Boulevard, and the newest Jack Taylor crime novel Purgatory

“Woods’ wild mix of smart stories, peppered with Chandleresque imagery, will run you through just enough hell to make you like it!”
—Vicki Hendricks, author of Miami Purity, Iguana Love, and Fur People

“These stories really snap, crackle, and pop. Jonathan Woods is an old-fashioned storyteller, and there is an accent here, a resonant voice, that is drawn from a very deep well of crime fiction and noir films. He’s playing with the genre, delighting in its dark discourse, yet there is a wildness running through these pages…Highly recommended.”
—Jay Parini, Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College and author of The Last Station and Robert Frost: a Life

“By all means pick up Phone Call From Hell. Woods’ stories are suspenseful, intelligent, original, literate, in short, difficult to trace, impossible to put down.”
—Arthur Nersesian, author of The Fuck-Up and Gladyss of the Hunt

“In Phone Call from Hell, Woods walks you right to the edge of sanity, right to that dim borderland where the moral order of the universe is about to collapse. There, just at the point where the world is about to fly apart in tiny, Doritos-sized pieces, is where the action of his stories takes place. These are wildly imaginative tales, and that is an understatement.”
—S.C. Gwynne, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Empire of the Summer Moon

“The stories in Phone Call from Hell are taut and compelling little gems from an exciting and unique talent. I loved this book!”
—Joe R. Lansdale, Edgar Award-winning author of The Bottoms, Mucho Mojo, Bad Chili, and The Thicket

“In Phone Call from Hell & Other Tales of the Damned, Woods offers 17 outlandish, often violent and raunchy, excursions into neo-pulp. The title story involves looking for a date on the suggestion of a random phone call from Charles Manson. In ‘Writer’s Block,’ Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene hunt for action in 1959 Havana. ‘FTS’—well, the title says it all. Some of the yarns are not so much short stories as micronovels—‘The Other,’ an intense hunt for serial killers; ‘Crash & Burn,’ an explosive opus on the Texas-Mexico border. Trademark wild-ass similes and metaphors emblazon almost every page: ‘The imperious tropical sun beat down relentlessly like the cat-o-nine-tails of the Marquis de Sade’; ‘the moon burst above the eastern hills like a floodlight on a prison break’; ‘Her eyes glowed like burning German cities after a B-17 night raid.’ You want it brazen and loud, Woods really knows how to bang that gong.”
—Publishers Weekly 02/24/2014