[In the following review, Stade criticizes Vachss's novel Shella as having a "preposterous" plot and "dialogue unlike anyone has ever said, anywhere."]

Ghost, the hero and narrator of Andrew Vachss's seventh roman noir, has just been released from prison. He is looking for his old flame Shella, as she calls herself (a social worker once told her she needed to "come out of her shell"), with whom Ghost used to work the badger game. But when Ghost killed a john who got his kicks by beating prostitutes, Shella fled the scene, leaving Ghost to face the music and serve serious time in jail. Now on parole, which he immediately violates, Ghost travels from city to city, casing the strip joints, Shella's old haunts, which are described by Mr. Vachss with prurient indignation.

He finances his quest with the odd job, for Ghost is by trade an assassin. A half-dozen or so of his killings are described in Shella, a dozen or so-more alluded to. His specialty is to break his victims' necks: Ghost, like Grendel, has a mighty grip. In fact, he is the best in the business, given his steady hands; his patience, his know-how, his invisibility ("Nobody sees me"), his ability to be physically and emotionally anesthetized, his absence of inner conflict, his single-mindedness. Ghost isn't much of a reader, doesn't know how to shake hands or smile; he is fairly indifferent to sex, eschews drugs and alcohol, can't understand why people put up pictures on their walls. But he does love his Shella—or maybe he hates her. With a man like Ghost, the difference hardly counts.

Getting nowhere, Ghost searches out a gangster named Monroe, who has many sources of information, and offers a trade: Ghost will do a guy for Monroe; Monroe will locate Shella. Ghost does the guy and even throws in a freebie, also a nasty character—but then all of Ghost's victims are nasty characters, usually sexual "freaks," for Mr. Vachss wants us to admire his hero. Unfortunately, Monroe welshes on his part of the deal and sends a hit man after Ghost. But this poor fellow fails, fatally.

Things begin to look up when Ghost is approached by an Indian, name of Wolf, who knows a soul mate when he sees one: "You and me, we're the same. Brothers in the blood," says Wolf, who belongs to a "pack" of Indian professional assassins. Their problem is that they can't get close to the man their client wants taken out, the leader of a neo-Nazi cult. If Ghost will do the job, the client, a mad computer genius, will locate Shella, guaranteed.

The second half of Mr. Vachss's novel is devoted to Ghost's adventures among the cult members, figures out of tabloid television, as he moves from the outer to the inner circle. Along the way, he easily passes his initiation test, which is to kill a black man; but because he selects a pimp who "works little girls," we aren't expected to hold it against him.

Does Ghost break the leader's neck? Does he find Shella? My lips are sealed. It can be said, though, that the plot is preposterous, the characters based on rumor, paranoia and light literature, the dialogue unlike anything anyone has ever said, anywhere. In this respect Shella is like Mr. Vachss's other novels, whose hero and narrator is Burke, another psychopath with whom his creator is in love. In Shella there is the same self-pity and self-congratulation as in the Burke novels, even the butterfly symbolism and sentimentality about dogs.

When it comes to style, however, Shelia is an improvement over its predecessors. Burke tells his stories in a style that is both laconic and garrulous; the sentences are short or fragmentary, but there are pages of them given over to fulminations against urban-depravity and sexual predation, especially of children. Ghost, on the other hand, is laconic and affectless; in Shella, the righteous indignation is expressed through particulars, rather than by tone or outright assertion.

Ghost's character and Shella's gradually revealed savagery, as it turns out, are explained (and excused) by backgrounds of childhood neglect and abuse. These are serious matters, but as Mr. Vachss uses them they feel like moral blackmail, pretexts for murder and fantasies of revenge. It is no use, of course, knocking the other guy's fantasy fiction: the genre's function is to allow in the imagination what we deny ourselves in the flesh, and it is just as likely to siphon off dangerous emotions as to encourage them. If you are boiling over with vengeful fury upon which you cannot act, Mr. Vachss may be the man for you—now that Mickey Spillane is out of style.