The Beautiful Dead End is a stripped down, existential crime thriller. Stace wakes up dead and finds himself travelling through a shadowy interzone in search of answers from his fucked-up past. from the Globe and Mail "Victoria writer Clint Hutzulak opens his first novel with a precise and uninflected description of sex for cash in a frigid parking lot outside a truckstop motel. Stace and Tanya are renewing a fractured friendship. "Stace has returned after a year's absence, mostly to even the score with his ex, Lillis Rae. Driven by dull, chronic rage, he's a wandering loser with the heart of a poet; he knows there's a higher plane he could aim for, but bitterness and the surrender to drugs and booze have brought him to a festering standstill. "Stace's solution is to surprise Lillis Rae's new boyfriend in the driveway of his house and kill him with his own shotgun. Hutzulak's rendering of the scene is stunning in every aspect. The crystalline cinematic focus, Stace's dreamlike perceptions as the deed unfolds, the dobermans going wild inside the house, the poplar trees fluttering in the yard, the explosion of flesh into blood and bone -- every detail of setting and behaviour and inner response contributes to the spare, mesmerizing beauty of Hutzulak's prose." ---------- Here are a few scenes from the novel, to give you an idea of how it reads, and what milieu the characters find themselves in. An excerpt appears in the February issue of subTerrain magazine (#33). Dickey (5 pages) <BDE [Scene Dickey].pdf>, 88 KB Living Room (3 pages) <BDE [Scene Living Room].pdf>, 84 KB Jack-lighting (9 pages) <BDE [Scene Jack-lighting].pdf>, 100 KB The Beautiful Dead End Fiction / Literature 5 x 7.25 inches 208 pages ISBN 1-895636-39-6 Published by Anvil Press PUBLICATION DATE January 2002 PDF / eBook download Read a sample scene using Adobe's free Acrobat Reader or eBook Reader, for Mac or PC.