I generally try to be a positive guy. I like to look on the bright side, or, barring that, bite down on my mouthpiece and do the dirty, but necessary work of civilization. That being said, I do have two very “blackpilled” opinions.
One: If you are a hard worker, and I mean the hardest working dude at your jobsite or office, then your guaranteed reward for this is…more work. I have seen it and been on the receiving end many times. Diligence in the modern workplace means that you are a mule targeted for exhaustion. Since most of your co-workers are burnouts, “quiet quitters,” or generally incompetent, your superiors will tap you or anyone with an above-basement IQ for every task until you either rage quit or give up the ghost and accept that you’ll die of a pulmonary embolism at 50.
Two: One good decision rarely multiplies, but one bad decision can compound until your life is absolutely ruined. And since almost nobody is a true Boy Scout, I would argue that a nontrivial amount of the population is stuck where they are because of one bad decision that spread like an oil spill, drowning them in an inky-black sea of struggle. Sam Schuler’s life is kind of like that—he is the innocent man who happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and everything following goes to absolute shit.
Originally published by Gutter Books back in 2013, Matthew Louis’s The Wrong Man (Vigilante Crime & Pulp, 2025) is the sordid story of Sam Schuler’s descent from an aspiring husband and everyman to a vicious killer. The novel, which is as short and sharp as any jab or cross to the nose, begins at a party.
There’s a thrash metal band playing at someone’s house. It is one of those cool, breezy California nights, and the crowd is a mix of tough-looking Mexicans and rough-looking white kids. It is not Sam’s scene, or at least not anymore. Sam was a hessian once, but no longer. He has a job selling cigarettes and booze at Vanguard Liquors, plus he’s a student at Morse Junior College. And on top of all of that, he’s got a baby on the way. Sam may not yet be thirty, but he has the responsibilities of a full-grown man.
Unfortunately for Sam, Rich Channing still has his training wheels on. A stoner and thief, Rich decides to boost a brick of the sticky-icky from the party. Rich takes said stolen herb into Sam’s car and offers to give him a piece of the action. Sam freaks out and gets Rich to throw the loot out of the window just before their car is pulled over by the po-po. Whew! Crisis averted. Sam goes home thinking that the weed saga has been put to rest.
Not so fast, says Owen Ferguson. Despite the Gaelic surname, Owen is a local hoodlum who runs a small gang of Mexican kids in Blackmer. Their HQ is the Mexican restaurant next to Vanguard Liquors, so it’s no journey for Owen to walk up to Sam while he’s on his shift. Owen tells Sam that there’s a problem: he and Rich stole Owen’s weed, and that kind of insult requires vengeance. Rich has already been beaten up. It’s now Sam’s turn. Thus, the narrative of The Wrong Man is set in motion.
Louis writes with the speed of an adrenaline junkie. There isn’t a wasted moment or even an extraneous punctuation in this noir roller-coaster. Everything flows in a linear, gory line. The careless confiscation of Owen’s weed leads to several fistfights, shootouts, and multiple grisly executions. Sam is at the center of this madness. At first, he is the hapless victim—a good kid caught in a maelstrom who gets others to do dirty deeds on his behalf. Then, near the novel’s endpoint, something profound happens. Sam stops being the wrong man done dirty by circumstances and becomes a cold-hearted killer. The immediate cause of this shift is the rape of Sam’s pregnant girlfriend. At first, Sam suspects Owen and his goons. Then, after a gruesome series of murders in the last stretch of wilderness in Southern California, Sam comes to realize that someone else—someone once considered a friend—was responsible for violating the sanctity of his home.
The characters are the strength of The Wrong Man. Besides Sam, who is a convincing everyman, there is Sam’s cousin Tommy, a brutalized ex-con who is proficient in the arts of lovemaking and theft. Coozehound Tommy has no problem helping Sam to get the better of Owen Ferguson, but Tommy is the kind of hood guilty of always going too far all the time. On the other end of the spectrum is Sam’s grandfather—a grizzled Korean War vet who returned stateside to drive a diesel rig for thirty years. He’s the kind of fellow who rocks a mean pair of sideburns well past the time they stopped being hip, and he’s the kind of cool cat who never cottoned onto civil rights, women’s lib, or automatic transmissions. Described as a “middle-American redneck,” Sam’s grandfather spends his last days arguing about libtards with other insomniac Republicans and doing his best to get Sam extricated from his mess of a situation. The old man pulls through just before he kicks the proverbial bucket.
Much like Everything on Black, The Wrong Man is a streetwise noir about regular people, not detective fiction archetypes. Although its towns (Blackmer, Del Mar) are fictional, the novel exudes a kind of rottenness—a toxicity increased by sun exposure—that can only be found in the multi-ethnic stew of the very real Southern California. Here people, both Mexican and Anglo, are all fringe types—addicts, gangsters, and general lowlifes who somehow feel out-of-place in the Golden State despite being in the majority. Desperation has been normalized into almost nonexistence for these people, and the horror of Louis’s book comes when the well-adjusted Sam has to become just like the filth to escape the deluge.
The Wrong Man is a kind of Hitchcockian thriller if Jim Thompson had written it during an odd splatterpunk phase. It is a taut, hyper-aggressive novel that can be consumed in a single day, probably a Sunday, bloody Sunday.