Carcaterra writes not about the loss of innocence, but the decimation of it. His first book, 1993’s ““A Safe Place,’’ pivoted around the day he learned his old man had smothered his first wife to death with a pillow. His second memoir, 1995’s ““Sleepers,’’ purported to tell of his boyhood on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, in Manhattan. Carcaterra claimed that he and some buddies had been inhumanly abused by a guard in a boys’ prison, and had then grown up, shot the scumbag in a bar and, in an elaborate courtroom con, gotten away with murder.
““A Safe Place’’ was lauded. ““Sleepers’’? Everybody bought it, but nobody really bought it: it became a best seller even as it was discredited by reporters, the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the local Sacred Heart school. (Carcaterra had been absent only 19 days. Where’d he find the time to spend a year in prison?) In retrospect, what’s most troubling about ““Sleepers’’ is not the fact-to-fiction ratio - someone clearly did this man tremendous harm - but the way Carcaterra turned his own life into pulp fiction, whipping his prose into an unrelenting purple rain. ““Sleepers’’ was a bad movie long before director Barry Levinson made it official.
Carcaterra’s publisher sneaked ““Apaches’’ into stores without circulating advance galleys to the press, no doubt looking to avoid multiple stab wounds. The truth is that Carcaterra’s prose is spare this time, and ““Apaches’’ is a slick entertainment if you’ve got the stomach for it. After Jennifer is abducted, a crippled ex-cop named Giovanni (Boomer) Frontieri assembles a renegade outfit of other crippled ex-cops to solve the case. All the ““Apaches’’ are thrill junkies. All of them have nicknames. ““A normal cop would have been on the talkie asking for backup. Boomer hated backup.''
Before long, the Apaches stumble onto a massive crack ring, as well as what must be the most pointlessly gruesome plot twist in history. It seems that the drug runners buy babies, kill them and then smuggle cocaine and cash in their hollowed-out bodies. You can imagine how much this pisses Boomer off. In April, several movie studios reportedly declined to buy ““Apaches’’ because they were troubled by the infanticide. Even after Disney Studios gave Carcaterra a deal that could eventually be worth $2.5 million, producer Jerry Bruckheimer felt moved to say, ““I assure you, we will not do anything that’s against the moral fiber.’’ Ah, Southern Baptists can rest easy now.
Babies filled with drugs - it’s the strongest metaphor imaginable for the corruption of innocence. And the stupidest, frankly. To be fair, though, Carcaterra never comes off as a sadist in this novel. He’s so clearly writing about himself when he writes about the young girl - so obviously revisiting the scene of his own abuse, whatever it actually was - that unsettling moments of private truth glint up out of a book otherwise obsessed with how great cops are. It’s a strange, Sisyphean task that Carcaterra has set for himself. He imagines scenes of evil simply so he can avenge them, and then he imagines some more. The author’s now working on an ““Apaches’’ sequel called ““Shadows.’’ Readers will no doubt die for this stuff. But, for Carcaterra, it cannot be an easy way to find peace.
