Andrew Vachss: Shella (UK 1994)

From the Publisher:
"A noir archetype as bare as unfinished furniture. The plot...has been sanded down into a taut monofilament... The prose in Shella is boiled to the bone." -- Village Voice
From the author of the acclaimed Burke private-eye series comes an ambitious and chilling novel that shows us not only what evil is, but where it comes from. For Shella is nothing less than a tour of evil's spawning ground, conducted by one of its natural predators.

He is called "Ghost" because he is so nondescript as to be invisible and because he slays with such reflexive ease that he might be one of the dead. Once he traveled with a woman who was called "Shella" -- because those who had treated her as a horrendously ill-used child had tried to make her come out of her shell. Now Shella has vanished in a wilderness of strip clubs and peep shows, and Ghost is looking for her, guided by a killer's instinct and the recognition that can only exist between two people who have been damaged past the point of no return. The result is Andrew Vachss's most compelling work to date, the thriller reimagined as a bleak romance of the damned.

"Vachss tells his story in an understated shorthand.... He seems bottomlessly knowledgeable... about the depth and variety of human twistedness." -- The New York Times

Andrew Vachss: Shella. Pan, ISBN: 0330334131 (October, 1994), 225 p., £4.99.

Andrew Vachss: Shella (USA 1994)

From the Publisher:
"A noir archetype as bare as unfinished furniture. The plot...has been sanded down into a taut monofilament... The prose in Shella is boiled to the bone." -- Village Voice
From the author of the acclaimed Burke private-eye series comes an ambitious and chilling novel that shows us not only what evil is, but where it comes from. For Shella is nothing less than a tour of evil's spawning ground, conducted by one of its natural predators.

He is called "Ghost" because he is so nondescript as to be invisible and because he slays with such reflexive ease that he might be one of the dead. Once he traveled with a woman who was called "Shella" -- because those who had treated her as a horrendously ill-used child had tried to make her come out of her shell. Now Shella has vanished in a wilderness of strip clubs and peep shows, and Ghost is looking for her, guided by a killer's instinct and the recognition that can only exist between two people who have been damaged past the point of no return. The result is Andrew Vachss's most compelling work to date, the thriller reimagined as a bleak romance of the damned.

"Vachss tells his story in an understated shorthand.... He seems bottomlessly knowledgeable... about the depth and variety of human twistedness." -- The New York Times

Andrew Vachss: Shella. Vintage Books / Black Lizard, ISBN: 0679756817 (August, 1994), 225 p., $10.00.

Andrew Vachss: Shella (USA 1993)

From the Publisher:
In his new novel Andrew Vachss moves beyond his powerful evocations of the private eye as pursuer and scourge of the evildoer. Now, in Shella, he explores the making of evil -- the depths beneath the lower depths of American society and the terrifying products of that netherworld where children are born into ultimate abandonment and abuse, where only a few survive and some emerge not fully human.

One such survivor is the man known as Ghost. His personality has been formed, diamond-hard, in the crucible of chilly orphanages and hellish juvenile prisons. He has grown the way a baby alligator grows -- in size alone, not in essence. He has no experience of nurture or education.

He has become an instrument. A weapon to be used by predators. He works only with his hands. His work -- his art -- is killing. He is a superb killer: imaginative, efficient, precise, cold. He easily finds employment. When he does time, he emerges from prison neither hurt nor healed -- exactly as before.

But now he is no longer drifting. He has a mission that enlists all his banked energies: to track the woman who calls herself Shella. She is a runway dancer. She is, like himself, a survivor of her own destruction, kept alive by anger. But Ghost knows that she has, for an instant, glimpsed the man behind the steel mask he wears, and that she is as astonished as he to find someone to connect with.

Shella has disappeared. And Ghost -- desperate to reconnect -- discovers the only route that might lead him back to her: straight through the cruel alleys, the topless bars, the dark tunnels of pornography and prostitution, into the raging center of a neo-Nazi enclave whose leader is instantly drawn to him...

Shella is the story ofa killer stalking his destined prey, driven by forces he cannot understand. It is the story of a man searching for a witness to his own humanity.

Andrew Vachss: Shella. A Novel. Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN: 0679424164 (April, 1993), 225 p., $20.00.