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Willy Vlautin

Author of The Motel Life

11+ Works 1,832 Members 115 Reviews 8 Favorited

About the Author

Works by Willy Vlautin

The Motel Life (2006) 417 copies
Lean on Pete (2010) 407 copies
Northline (2008) 290 copies
The Free (2014) 287 copies
Don't Skip Out on Me (2018) 227 copies
The Night Always Comes (2021) 197 copies
Kill Switch 1 copy
The Horse: A Novel (2024) 1 copy

Associated Works

xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths (2013) — Contributor — 274 copies
Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales (2007) — Contributor — 51 copies
Please: Fiction Inspired by The Smiths (2009) — Contributor — 38 copies

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From GoodReads/Amazon: Barely thirty, Lynette is exhausted. Saddled with bad credit and juggling multiple jobs, some illegally, she’s been diligently working to buy the house she lives in with her mother and developmentally disabled brother Kenny. Portland’s housing prices have nearly quadrupled in fifteen years, and the owner is giving them a good deal. Lynette knows it’s their last best chance to own their own home—and obtain the security they’ve never had. While she has enough for the down payment, she needs her mother to cover the rest of the asking price. But a week before they’re set to sign the loan papers, her mother gets cold feet and reneges on her promise, pushing Lynette to her limits to find the money they need.

Set over two days and two nights, The Night Always Comes follows Lynette’s frantic search—an odyssey of hope and anguish that will bring her face to face with greedy rich men and ambitious hustlers, those benefiting and those left behind by a city in the throes of a transformative boom."

From me: oh, Lynette. No happy endings. So much struggle and so little in return. Are there any answers to these problems? Great story.
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ParadisePorch | 10 other reviews | Nov 24, 2023 |
Bleak, sad story of people who can not catch a break. Freddie McCall is broke and broken by the horrible life he leads, unable to think of a way to get free of his mountain of debt and his nightmare-fuel jobs. Leroy is a comatose patient who is locked in his own head where he's decided to go into a fictional world he created to keep from going insane.

The intersection of his horrible past, his tormented present, and Freddie's late-capitalist dysfunction that only barely resembles a life is through the care home where they sort-of exist in juxtaposition. Pauline, a downtrodden nurse and caregiver to a deeply terrible father, winds her way down grocery store aisles as she creates and completes checklist after checklist. No one is getting out of here whole, or even necessarily alive.

Author Vlautin, a musician by trade, eschews song-type restrictions on his prose for a maximalist moment-by-moment account of each character's separate bad-dream life. The accumulation of detail and the internal lives of these average people build a crooked, ramshackle story-verse that each is unaware that they share with the others.

Be aware that there is no redemptive arc or happy resolution in this breathtakingly honest and unsparing portrait of non-essential people doing essential work, then suffering for wanting more than the bare minimum that they can claw out of the filth and decay around them. It's a hard story but a beautiful book.
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richardderus | 22 other reviews | May 12, 2023 |
Abandoned by his mother, orphaned of his father, 15-year old Charley sets on a journey across America to find his aunt, the only remaining relative who can possibly offer him a better life. He is accompanied on this journey by a horse he befriends (and steals) - Lean on Pete.

Willie Vlautin's "road novel" is recounted in the first-person. Charley's narrative voice uses simple words to devastating effect. This is a tale which skirts the depths of despair and yet finds hope flowering in the most unexpected of places.… (more)
 
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JosephCamilleri | 34 other reviews | Feb 21, 2023 |
Noir Was The Night
Review of the Harper Perennial paperback edition (May 17, 2022) of the original Harper hardcover (April 6, 2021)

This book has a deceptive opening but very soon it plunges into a maelstrom of desperation and crime (not all of which is initiated by the protagonist) as she makes a last ditch attempt to salvage a home purchase for her family of a mother and developmentally challenged brother. Lynette is leading a hard scrabble existence with 2 jobs as baker and bartender, working to save money towards what she sees as a longed for mark of stability in the fast growing housing market in Portland, Oregon, USA.

When her mother reneges on a deal to make a house loan, Lynette tries to call in all possible debts to make up further funding for the purchase of their rundown house. The overnight attempt takes her on a harrowing journey through sex work, car theft, burglary, safe cracking, and drug dealing, not to mention being the potential victim of two attempted murderous assaults.

See photograph at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/Southeast_Portland%2C_...
Photograph of the exterior of the Hotcake House in Portland, Oregon, one of the locations in "The Night Always Comes". Image sourced from Wikipedia.

This was a compulsively readable thriller which has you rooting for the underdog protagonist all the way, even when she may not be the most likeable character or the maker of the best decisions. Normally the tags of 'noir' and 'hardboiled' are used for the detective genre, but they are completely appropriate for this domestic family drama. My thanks to GR Friend Berengaria's 4.5-5 star review which alerted me to this book.

Soundtrack, Trivia and Links
As author Willy Vlautin is also a musician and songwriter for the band The Delines, the group released a limited edition album as the soundtrack for The Night Always Comes which is freely available for download through a QR code printed on the back of the Harper Perennial paperback. The full track listing can be seen on Discogs and a video single was released as Don't Think Less of Me.

A book trailer which shows some of the locations mentioned in The Night Always Comes can be seen here.

Author Vlautin is interviewed on the book's release by the Poisoned Pen bookstore YouTube channel here.

Author Vlautin is interviewed on the book's release by Oregon Public Broadcasting and you can read the interview at Willy Vlautin’s new novel is a melancholic love letter to working-class Portland.
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alanteder | 10 other reviews | Jan 27, 2023 |

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Works
11
Also by
4
Members
1,832
Popularity
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Rating
3.9
Reviews
115
ISBNs
134
Languages
6
Favorited
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