Any reading I do this weekend will be from inside my fortress of solitude, locked in the porcelain throne room. I will owe myself to my family and to friends who will feel slighted if I am not spending the Christmas holiday acknowledging their presence, presents and adorable children or pets or casserole or cute powdered sugar cookies. I will spend the weekend stuffed into my sweater, (singular), which each year becomes less roomy and my eyes will glaze over from food, drink, excited children, food, assembly instructions and food and will need a few minutes to myself… every few minutes. My selection for this precious time alone is Jim Nisbet's The Damned Don't Die.

I read my first Nisbet only months ago, the Overlook Press reprint of Lethal Injection and it made a mighty impression. It concerned a struggling doctor in Texas who takes on the gig of administering the titular procedure to death row inmates. It’s a lousy way to make a living, but he needs the extra money. During one procedure he becomes convinced that he is ending the life of an innocent man and it causes him no little discomfort and afterward he launches his own investigation into the crime he killed the condemned for.

Friends, this is midnight noir, dark and dank and infused with doom, but rendered with beautiful phrasing and full of that human ache, that longing for connection and fulfillment and the assumption that there has to be a heaven for this must be hell, that elevates it above the level of pornographic despair. If The Damned Don’t Die is half the book Lethal Injection was, I’ll be well served.

And they’re short. Thank God, they are short. Nisbet needs less than two hundred pages to deliver his tales and that fact, coupled with his track record are putting his titles at the top of my to-be-read pile. He’s one of those author’s whose name sounds familiar, I’ve probably heard it dropped and discussed for years without it ever registering for some reason and now that his titles are becoming available again, I’m deliriously happy to have another writer of quality to catch up on.

Merry Christmas. I’ll be in the bathroom.

Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.