Anti-Hero
Michael Tenaglia
Screaming Hills Press
264 pages
$12.95 paperback
Two stars (out of 5)

Billy Donovan is an anti-hero. What does that mean, exactly? Well, for starters, it means he’s pissed off at a lot of things. Most things, actually. Billy Donovan is also an anarchist. How do we know he’s an anarchist? Well, because he tells you. A lot. Sometimes 10 times in one chapter. He’s also an ex-boxer, an out-of-work actor, a writer and a construction worker. Billy Donovan don’t take no shit from agents, assholes, drunks, screenwriters, Russian cab drivers, cops, fat women or any kind of “want-to-be fascists.” Billy Donovan is a lot of things. But most importantly, he’s the title character of the lame novel Anti-Hero by Michael Tenaglia.

The real shame about Anti-Hero is that I really want it to succeed. I wanted it to be a much better book than it turns out to be. Billy, despite (or maybe because of) his faults, is a fascinating character and his world (New York City) is, to say the least, not boring.

That Anti-Hero comes from an independent publisher (Screaming Hills Press, which as near as I can tell from its Web site, has one book currently in publication) is another reason why I wished for the book’s success. I even find myself agreeing with about 90 percent of Billy’s anarchy philosophy. But it’s hard to ignore Anti-Hero’s many, many faults.

Short of finding the new love of his life, nothing much happens to Billy to really change his persona. At the end, he’s the exact same person he was at the beginning of the book. Because of this, every chapter in the book feels like the previous chapter, and the book kind of ends arbitrarily. There are also at least a half-a-dozen characters in the book named John.

Anti-Hero is written as Billy’s diary, and that makes it fascinating—in the way that reading anyone’s diary would be fascinating. But sometimes it just feels as if it’s written that way in order to hide its many editing mistakes. There are at least one or two glaring spelling or grammatical errors in every chapter of Anti-Hero, which can make it a very frustrating read (especially if you happen to be an English major). There are even times when, despite Billy’s fascinating life, he kind of overstays his welcome, and the reader might find him- or herself wishing for someone else to take over, at least for a change of pace or perspective.
There are only so many times we can read this guy talking about how much of an anarchist he is, or mention the death of John Lennon (whom Billy seems fascinated with, but never fully explains why).

There are brief moments of beauty in Anti-Hero. Remember that Billy is supposed to be, among other things, a writer, and you can feel him at least trying to be one in certain descriptions. Women “smoke their gossip sticks and talk their cancer talk” on Billy’s porch. Sometimes these descriptions work and sometimes they don’t. They don’t work when Billy takes the too-easy way out (watching somebody die, Billy contends that “words can’t describe it”), but they do work when Tenaglia changes how you always thought of everyday things, such as sunsets and “the equity” in them. But these pretty interludes are few and far between—and hit-and-miss, which hardly makes up for the other 230 or so pages.

It’s honestly a real shame that Anti-Hero isn’t better than it is. Despite its lack of redeeming qualities, you can feel that a lot of love went into this novel’s existence. Here’s hoping for better, but just as passionate, independent books in the future.
jordan@red-mag.com