Like-Minded Individuals by Beau Johnson
Publication Date: Feb. 2, 2025 | Down and Out Books
In 2017, Beau Johnson introduced an immediately iconic folk antihero with his violent vigilante, ex-cop Bishop Rider, in his short story collection, A Better Kind of Hate. Although Rider’s stories were but a small part of that collection, he loomed larger than life across that whole spread, so much so that Rider then became the primary focus of Johnson’s subsequent work. Inspired and influenced by similar characters, Rider was a riff on the familiar — part The Punisher, part Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey from Death Wish — but what immediately set him apart was Johnson’s play on the chronology of the character’s exploits and his commitment to the life of this character, from his bloody initiation to the rule of lawlessness to his eventual demise. Rider was a wholly complete character study, and his story was told entirely out of order, through a series of short stories across multiple books, but with certain benchmarks to delineate the order of occurrence. Some stories took place before Rider was violently maimed, others took place well after, as an older man. Some occurred before the death of a central figure, while others followed. Allies came and went, either by choice or through gruesome ends. Rider and his small circle of cohorts wreaked bloody vengeance across the fictional New York-like setting of Culver City, a hellhole grimy and gritty enough to fit in Frank Miller’s Sin City, ruled as it is by various networks of organized crime, crooked politicians, pedophile priests, and street gang thugs. Johnson’s take on neo-noir is the very definition of pitch black. Forget various shades of grey, think various shades of darkness with no light at the end at all. And the acts of violence carried out by Rider and his companions, which were oftentimes as varied and spectacular as they were wholly uncompromising, rarely ever came without lasting personal effects. Johnson was playing a long con, as he made clear from the beginning, and finally capitalized on when he laid out all his cards in Old Man Rider and killed off his series character.
Bishop Rider was dead and buried.
But his memory, and more importantly his mission, lived on in Jeremiah Abrum, the son of a former crime boss looking to make good on his family name by adopting Rider’s tactics and aiming bigger. It didn’t take long for Abrum to step well out of Rider’s long shadow in 2023’s The Abrum Files, which passed the torch from one violent killer to another and gave us another riff on the familiar but with a fresh coat of paint and a whole new bad-ass attitude.
Like-Minded Individuals continues Abrum’s story, as told through Johnson’s typical non-sequential narrative spread across 20-plus brand-new short stories. As is Johnson’s style, some stories are set in the past, with one taking place late in the life of Bishop Rider, whose legacy continues to inform and occasionally downright haunt the events taking place throughout this collection, while others are set further down a roughly sketched and slowly revealed chronological timeline, teasing events yet to transpire for reader’s gruesome pleasures. There’s certain benchmarks to measure these happenings against, like the presence of Rory, a ruthless red-headed redresser who helps give Abrum a larger canvas upon which to operate, and the development of a training camp on land bequeathed to Jeremiah.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of this book, and the Bishop Rider series as a whole, is Johnson’s unflinching portrayal of violence. Although Johnson spares no expense in conjuring up all kinds of viciously violent ends for the scum of the earth, he’s also careful not to get too wrapped up in the muck. It’s bloody and grotesque, but never exploitatively so. Johnson plays a rather deft hand, carefully balancing the descriptions he commits to the page against all that he leaves up to the imagination — and I assure you, he leaves plenty up to the imagination, relying on the reader’s own ability to deploy the worst of it.
All of this is levied against sparse moments of black humor that is, fittingly, as dark as the rest of these proceedings. I don’t recall finding many moments of levity in Bishop Rider’s grim crusade, but Abrums? Abrums has got some jokes, son, and moments of cutting self-depreciation, like when he describes himself as “a middle-aged white dude working out his daddy issues one decapitation at a time.” After rounding up a group of upper-crust pedophiles and dumping them into an emptied out pool about to be flooded with acid, he notes of their condition, “many of them weren’t so much backed against the pool’s wall now as they were attempting to phase through it. Ah, Tuesdays.” Abrums’s work isn’t all fun and games, but one certainly cannot deny that he’s able to find a measure of sociopathic joy in it all at the end of the day.
The end result is uncompromisingly brutal catharsis. Johnson’s body of work arrives at an interesting juncture within our society’s late-stage capitalism, where the murder of a healthcare CEO is met with a collective shrug of the shoulders from a populace tired of the sadism of rich fuckers who profit off the deaths of their clientele, yet opt to elect a rich rapist to the highest office in the land over far more experienced and personable woman of color. Jeremiah Abrums, and Bishop Rider before him, exist as brash, vocal counterweights to real-life injustices, punishing the Brock Turners, Donald Trumps, Proud Boys, and Jeffrey Epsteins of the world through fictional fill-ins, just as Dirty Harry, The Punisher, and Kersey arose in response to American lawlessness and the proliferation of drugs and gang violence of the ‘70s. They aren’t good guys. But they may be the necessary guys, the right guys, the ones needed to fix — or at least send a message to — our neutered justice system, the bastard cops, and an immoral country that caters wholly to the white, wealthy, and powerful. We get why they’re here. We understand why they do what they do and what drives them. And, maybe, we even cheer them on as they take apart a child predator, quite literally, one pound of flesh at a time. It’s not about saving people, as these characters often say, and which has become a motto for this series across its run, but maybe that’s OK. Maybe all this bloody, violent, torturous savagery is enough. Maybe it’s all we really deserve, in the end.
