Shella

by Andrew Vachss

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679424164
• ISBN13: 9780679424161
• Release Date: March 1993
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 225 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Very Dark Novel

Well written but very dark novel.

Well written story about a bleak world.

Vachss writing is spare and brutally to the point (no Anne Rice syndrome here). The world he writes about is bleak, devasting and brutal. In Shella he delves into the world of a young boy abandoned at places where he lived with fear and the constant threat of abuse and grew up to be a cold-hearted, brutal killer for hire who is known as Ghost. Only Shella, a street toughened dancer, ever saw beneath the hard shell. They are separated when Ghost is thrown in jail and now that he's out his one goal is to find Shella. This is an interesting look into the life of a killer. How cold-heartedly it happens out of necessity and survival. The book is bleak (have I said that already?) and disturbing. This was a difficult to put down book but it's not one I'd like to revisit due its complete sense of despair.

The peak of terror for Vachss

All of Andrew Vachss's early novels depict a New York City underbelly of infinite danger and infinite twisted evil... they make for terrifying reads. But for me, and other Vachss readers I've spoken with, SHELLA is the absolute peak of relentless horror. Probably only Vachss could create a situation where a child-like killer searches for the only woman who was ever kind to him, and at novel's end when he finds her, her first words to him are: "Please, KILL ME! " And during the search the main character, Ghost, encounters people and situations that would make Burke's usual enemies look like the regulars at the Tuesday Night sewing circle at a Methodist Church. If you read only one novel by Vachss this should be it.

Plain and simple...

...the finest love story written.While many see the darkness of Vachss' work, this book shows the "love" that drives Ghost's search for the only thing he really needs...Shella.

Another noir tour d' force by Vachss with a message!!!

Having read the entire Burke series by Andrew Vachss, I decided to read his one novel outside the series called Shella. And as with his other works I was more than pleased. In this fast paced, novel we meet the main characters "Ghost", an abused child who spent his life in foster homes, and institutions from which he emerges an emotionally disturbed killer. His only touch of human feelings coming from an equally disturbed abused child, the stripper turned S & M role player Shella. Written like all of Vachss' works in the first person narrative, we learn of the tale of Shella and Ghost through his eyes. It's a story that takes the reader through a world of violence, abuse, S & M, murder, and neo-Nazis camps. As Ghost tracks down Shella, after his release from prison only to find her terminally ill. Vachss's message again is that people like Ghost and Shella do exist, they are the lost souls of an America which neither cares for, nor wants to help the thousands of children left in state institutions, or with demented foster parents. Who then grow up to be the next generation, of dysfuctional dwellers of our cities, and rural towns. It is a tough no holds barred read, and if you like noir reading, and better still noir with a real message, then I recommend this novel highly.

Beyond Mans Heart of Darkness

Shella was the first novel by Andrew Vachss I read. Later I learned he was a lawyer and a champion of abused children, when I was seeking the source of the intense hold this book held over me. Mr. Vachss writes with the intensity of a sledge hammer through a plate glass window. He dares you to turn away from the horrors of life that somewhere, deep past the place where nightmares fear to tread, you always knew were there. In his characters Ghost and Shella, we see the victims of an evil polite society many times refuses to believe exists violently transformed into a shadow of the evil which created them. If this is all there was, we'd have the makings of any Hollywood action film. But what kept me reading was, at the core of his main characters, there lies a frail vestige of humanity. Ghost's search for his old partner seems only a damaged attempt to re-establish the only semblance of a family he ever had, and he goes about it the only way he knows how. I strongly recommend Shella to anyone interested in crime fiction, mystery novels, or horror, as it has elements of each, with this admonition: after you've read it, nothing will seem the same again