Voluntary Madness
by Vicki Hendricks
ISBN: 978-069237772-7
Description: Beautiful, sexy Juliette is madly in love with Punch. She’ll do absolutely anything for him. She also loves getting buck-naked on dark Key West byways and flashing strangers by moonlight. Punch loves Juliette … sort of. He loves even more the booze he drinks like a fish, Juliette’s inherited money on which he’s happy to live, the image of himself as a wannabe writer, and the idea of flaming out in a joint suicide when his novel is done and the money runs out. Together Juliette and Punch have come to Key West in a desperate quest for something vital, something eloquent in their lives—some antidote to their hollow loneliness. Voluntary Madness is a crazed, unputdownable motorcycle ride to either perdition or salvation, that has become a noir classic in its own time.
To read an interview with Vicki Hendricks on Paul D. Brazill’s Brit Grit & International Noir: Click Here.
To read a guest blog post by Vicki Hendricks about blue collar noir, which appeared on Paul D. Brazill's Brit Grit and International Noir: Click Here
To listen to a live podcast interview of Vicki Hendricks conducted by Steven Nester as part of his Poets of the Tabloid Murder web-radio series on Public Radio Exchange: Click Here
Raves for Voluntary Madness and Vicki Hendricks
The Rap Sheet named the New Pulp reissue of Vicki's Voluntary Madness as one of the top five crime fiction works published in 2015. Read
"Voluntary Madness is that rare creature, a book you don’t want to finish, but when it does, it leaves you with an ending that doesn’t disappoint."
—Time Out (London)
"Voluntary Madness is my favorite Vicki Hendricks novel. Sexy, gritty and raw, yet at the same time intelligent and touching, Voluntary Madness proves Vicki Hendricks is the queen of noir … This is a hardboiled book, with vivid, tough prose and crime elements that build as the tale progresses, but the genius of the story is the novel's struggle to differentiate between art and life, and the conflict inherent when these terms become mutually exclusive. A quick and frank read with the ability to cull weak readers from the literary herd."
—Victor Gischler, author of Gun Monkeys and Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse
"Voluntary Madness is a loosely updated and modern Bonnie and Clyde story taking place on the Florida Keys. This is a masterfully written novel, a noir erotica classic! The writing is tough, gritty, graphic, and leaves you disoriented. This is one of those books you can't put down, and it takes you on one hell of a ride."
—Dave Zeltserman, author of Small Crimes and Killer
"Voluntary Madness seems less noir than an homage to On the Road. There is that total hedonistic mission [its protagonists] Punch and Juliette have, where even their deaths are intended to be an act of rebellion. And yet, unlike Sal Paradise [narrator of On the Road], Juliette realizes there's something else. It'’s a long, hard journey to that point."
—Jim Winters, Edged in Blue
"In Voluntary Madness Hendricks spins a tale of excess and eroticism in this darkly slanted slice of life on the edge."—Kirkus UK
"Vicki Hendricks is the high priestess of neo-noir. A fierce and fearless talent."
—Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River, Shutter Island and The Drop
"Hendricks may be the least commercial but most literary of Florida crime writers. Her stories evoke Flannery O'Connor and Erskine Caldwell."—Booklist.
"Vicki Hendricks' novels . . . are all Florida noir thrillers, absolutely steeped in scorching sunshine, sweat, sex and murder. There’s no one else like her."
—welovethisbook.com
"Hendricks writes like the love child of Henry Miller and Anais Nin."
—Ft. Myers News-Press
"Vicki Hendricks is one wild dame. She goes places the rest of us have never been, don't even know the way to; and she comes back with stories that prove that everyone's lonely, everyone’s trying, and everyone’s human."
—S.J. Rozan, Edgar Award-winning author of The Shanghai Moon
"Tauntingly playful and consistently raunchy, Hendricks has blazed down a path all her own . . . Chandler, Hammett and Cain might be shocked at such maneuvers. But Hendricks is their first true female equivalent."—Independent on Sunday |
