HENRY'S LIST OF WRONGS by John Scott Shepherd
Reprinted from Aintitcool.com

From time to time, you stumble across something that looks like everything else at first glance, but upon further inspection is very revealing and completely engulfing. It happened to me recently with this tight little story of redemption from John Scott Shepherd, a guy who happens to be a screenwriter and a former advertising executive living in Kansas City, a quiet little bed of creativity tucked away in the Midwest. This novel seems to be a personal new frontier of story telling for the author, the way Richard Price grew up with THE BREAKS and LADIES MAN so many years ago. It's certainly not anything outside the norm like Palahniuk's FIGHT CLUB, or the incredibly visceral masterpiece by Craig Nova, INCANDSCENCE, but this guy has put up a good fight just the same and some props need to be paid.

What's wonderful to see in this sea of banality is a character that has four sides and operates in the three dimensional world. He's not holding anything back, but Shepherd certainly shows a broad stroke of restraint. He presents someone that I guarantee everyone will be able to identify with, a geeky kid who's got his heart set on the unattainable prize of the most beautiful, stunningly fantastic best looking chick in his high school class. He pines for her, and then suddenly as if by magic or some unseen hand, he gets his wish; she agrees to go to the high school senior prom with him. Just like that he's got everything that an eighteen year old kid could want, which seems very cool.

But Henry Chase lives in a house of ghosts; his father is dying in the back room with a bad case of the "Big Casino", and his mother and her sister are drinking their lives away. This is all set up for us in the first chapter, and if you can put this book down after this opening scene, then you're a lost cause. Go back to Danielle Steel and John Grisham.

What follows is the next ten years of Henry's life, sprinkled out over the rest of the book, put together like a puzzle where the picture on the front of the box only comes into full focus after all the pieces are put together. Shepherd holds much of this story under his thumb, giving just the bare minimum, but at the same time drawing a picture of Henry as the master of the universe with a driving force that in his mind justifies his every action. Shepherd takes the reader on a tour of the King Kong of assholes: Henry Chase is "The Assassin" and tears everyone down around him with such force and unbridled conviction that it seems he's never going to take his foot off the gas.

Shortly after completely destroying a long time family institution in his hometown, Henry meets his female match in the woman whom he discovers is cleaning his bathroom in his hotel room. If there is a weakness in this story, it's that Henry comes off as a little too callous with Sophie, who really is a saviour of sorts. But then again, his history with woman consists of Elizabeth, the prom queen who may still have his beating heart in her hand, and his mother, who's been in love with the bottle for Henry's entire life, to his great loss. The title of this book comes from the "list" of terrible things Henry has done in his life, and Sophie is there to help him make them right. By making amends for everything on this list, going back across his memory, Henry will clean his soul of all its piss and vinegar. This is the masterstroke that Shepherd manages with great ease. Everyone should regret not what they did, but what they didn't do, right? Well, Henry is regretting things he did and feels that his past is catching up to his soul, so he wants to go back and make it right with the people he wronged. That's right... not go back and make it right with the people who wronged him, since that would be vengeance, right? This is a book about redemption, in Henry's mind and ours. John Scott Shepherd is a very smart, talented and savvy storyteller. HENRY'S LIST OF WRONGS will leave you thinking about a great many things, and there are parts of this book that are truly inspired. On the whole it kicks much ass. I was left breathless through out most of it, and I'm sure you will be too.