It is perfectly fitting, and almost expected, that Joe Pernice would bring a long work of fiction into the world. The songs he has written for his pop band The Pernice Brothers are filled with vivid storylines and pointillist details. And Pernice has already proven his mettle as a fine fiction writer with his installment in the 33 1/3 book series, which used The Smiths' Meat Is Murder as a jumping off point for a beautifully crafted coming of age tale. But whereas his first literary effort was wrapped up in the swirling emotions and hormones of high school, his novel moves to the next stage of development: the slow slide toward adulthood. In many respects, Pernice trods a well-worn path covered by countless novels and films that have focused on emotionally stunted, artistically inclined young men as they fumble through a series of events that leaves them changed people at the end. What saves It Feels So Good When I Stop is how he veers off this path with regularity, giving us a variety of wholly original scenarios that lead to a conclusion that, in keeping with his protagonist's shiftless attitude toward the world, leaves many loose ends untied. The protagonist is a nameless 25-year-old male who has retreated to a small town in Cape Cod with little ambition other than to avoid both his uncertain future and Jocelyn, the woman he married a few weeks' prior to the book's opening scenes. Their tempestuous relationship is threaded through the story, letting the reader bounce back to the key moments and quick-witted banter and forward again to his shuffling attempts to get by while hiding out in a gutted home owned by his brother-in-law. As you would expect, the story follows Pernice's character as the layers of self-interest and ego are slowly peeled away, thanks to his begrudging involvement in the life of his young nephew (a toddler that he ends up watching on behalf of his brother-in-law) and by a strange, yet emotionally affecting relationship with Marie, a middle-aged wannabe filmmaker who hires him to help her finish a work that will help her come to terms with the death of her own young son. It is compelling enough to read as this unnamed gent slowly matures, but I found the sections devoted to his past to be much more engaging. The credit for this is wholly Pernice's as he captured the hyperaware, self-indulgent voice of this character perfectly. He's the type of character who has to let you know what record was on the turntable on a particular day because that is all that really matters to him. He'd much prefer to pick apart the careers of Todd Rundgren or Nick Drake instead of parsing out his feelings. The only parts that didn't ring true were the fulcrum of the story: his relationship with Jocelyn. There was little in the book to really make sense of what she found attractive in him, apart from maybe his ability to give as good as he got in their hyper realistic conversations. Those bits of banter felt strange in a book otherwise filled with honest and real dialogue. The witty back and forths between Jocelyn and the narrator glare from the page as if dropped in from a screenplay Pernice was working on in another window. But with so much else to shout about in the book, it's easy to gloss over those moments and get caught back up in the rest of the sharp narrative that Pernice has constructed. It's the novel as CD—you just need to skip over the plodding songs to get to the tracks you can sing along with. [Riverhead]
—Robert Ham
Though he's best known for fronting the late, great 
Drama City / The Turnaround
Why are these two 
Shoedog / The Night Gardner
A Firing Offense / Nick’s Trip / Down By The River Where The Dead Men Go
Somewhere between rare and cliché, there’s a particular life change that produces good crime fiction: A person follows a career path other than “published novelist” (or even “published writer”) and begins to read crime fiction. It goes from “regular interest” to “borderline Asperger’s syndrome” as this individual invades every nook and cranny with curiosity until a large amount of bad and good writing is absorbed. It’s heavy with the bad; there’s more garbage than gold in every genre of every artistic medium, yet some of the garbage turns out to be impossibly hard to put down. At some point, he says of the bad, “I can do a lot better than this.” And that’s what he ends up doing.
OK, perhaps I was projecting a little bit. Take out the implication of drooling insanity, and these are the basic building blocks of 
The Big Blowdown / King Suckerman / The Sweet Forever / Shame The Devil
Don’t be afraid of the raised lettering on the book jacket; a well-written crime-fiction novel deserves to be treated as high art. MAGNET’s Andrew Earles surveys the modern landscape of hard-boiled detective stories and tales of noir-colored underworlds.
For the last eight years, I’ve obsessed over crime fiction. My crusade to defend the genre as an important art form is certainly not a unique one; plenty have made it their cause to elevate good-to-great crime fiction beyond the mass-market, grocery-store/duty-free-shop stigma. My enthusiasm can be traced back to 
MAGNET has long been an admirer of 
Rewind 16 years. I’m nearing the end of my 20s, newly married to Emily Hawk, still passionate about music, movies and books. There are bills to pay and responsibilities to own up to. As this is the ‘80s, it doesn’t take a genius to move up the ladder. If you can fill up a suit, you can get promoted. That is, if you conform and buy into the whole mousse-and-Vuarnet trip. I like to work, but I can’t conform. So there I am, the general manager of a chain of major appliance stores, working 60-some hours a week. What I want, more than anything, is to be someone else. Remember the cover of Pleased To Meet Me, with the Rolex-and-diamond-horseshoe-ring hand shaking the hand with the frayed sleeve? Mine is the arm on the right and the left.
In that job, I have to be in my office by 7 a.m. I park my Ford pickup outside the building at 6:45, my Windsor knot strangling my throbbing neck, and turn up the v of my tape deck. “Bastards Of Young” comes forward at full volume, the bass vibrating the windows of the truck. That raging, volcanic music somehow gives me the courage to face another day. At work, “Unsatisfied” is constantly running through my head; Westerberg’s howl is my own. In the evenings, Emily and I talk, party and listen to music. Nights with Green On Red, the Dream Syndicate, X, Minor Threat and the Pogues, but always it comes back to the Mats. “Little Mascara” is Emily’s favorite song. I’m into “Left Of The Dial” and “Sixteen Blue.” There are tunes like “Favorite Thing,” “Hold My Life” and “Alex Chilton” for driving, “Here Comes A Regular” for drinking, “Kiss Me On The Bus” for love. The music of the Mats sounds like chaos, but to me it sounds like peace.
OK, here’s another middle-aged guy, getting stupid. Maybe. With rock ‘n’ roll you never know if it was really that transcendent or if it just seems that way in the golden glow of the rearview. Nostalgia clouds your judgment and often makes you unwilling to enjoy the new. “The Strokes are OK, but I’ve got the New York Dolls on Mercury vinyl, and anyway, when I want to hear the Ramones I put on Rocket To Russia.” Etc. But trust me, the Replacements really were that great.
Fast-forward 16 years. I’m in Paris, ending a two-month book tour. Friday night, my final commitment done, I return to my hotel room to relax. I open the balcony doors to get a view of the street, pour a double Four Roses neat, slip Westerberg’s Stereo into my Walkman, put my feet up on the coffee table and touch fire to a Marlboro Red. It’s the most memorable moment of my trip. Listening to “We May Be The Ones,” I’m moved like it’s 1986. And then, a few days later, I’m back in the States, hugging my daughter Rosa, rubbing her back, as “No Place For You” fills the room. Thinking that this music is just as powerful, and yeah, important, as it ever was.
Follow MAGNET On Twitter
