jdcorley's Reviews (191)

There are other Barron works and collections in my review history where I sort of roll my eyes at his shtick.  "What if those pulpy adventures really, if u think about it, starred a bunch of real shitheels?!" "Yea man, I know, that's why we have postmodernity. Like everything in all of contemporary genre literature exists as a response to this realization" "But what if they were real bad AND they came across something else real bad" (sigh) "Okay, fine, sure".  And in the first story of this collection you're kinda feeling like he's just doing it all again - imaginative enough to get you over the bumps but a bad omen.  Then in the second story, he pushes his protagonist just a bit further over the line into loneliness and pathos and it REALLY works.  The whole rest of the collection is equally terrific.  He resists his worst tics and develops his strengths - imagination, the embodiment of our point of view character, cosmic horror at its finest. Don't miss this terrific collection - even, or especially, if you got bored with Barron before.

Oates' incisive observation of cruelty - specifically, gendered cruelty - makes these stories a sharp set of lovely teeth, ready to bite down. A vicious parody of airline safety announcements is a bit less insightful. She must have had a tough trip!

It's really in this book that the 87th Precinct finds its feet. It's a very quotidian murder - a drug pusher is killed by someone else in the drug game. But the police procedural elements shine brightest when the wheels of the investigation and the counter-wheels of the criminals spread wider and wider, introducing new characters and systems of the city, and commenting on all their intersections and their thoughts. McBain commented that he thought of killing off a main character here, and the publisher stopped him. You can see his logic - ultimately this novel is a novel about the 87th Precinct and a dead junkie, not about any particular cop or criminal. Why not kill one of them? But the publisher noticed that everyone loves Carella, and Teddy, and everyone is right to love them.

I've commented on other works that, at their best, the 87th Precinct novels don't feel like a whitewash of American policing in the way some police procedurals do. This is a perfect example. Ultimately the observations of the city and the characters are what's happening. You're watching a location operate and the police are one of the forces in it. Things happen that are unjust - good luck and bad luck play themselves out - the cops are neither plucky underdogs in the face of evil criminality or genius soldiers in the endless war. They just stumble across stuff, and miss some other stuff, and so does everyone else.  It's a highly humanistic viewpoint, and thus lets the reader consider it with their own values.  

Perhaps this is the first real police procedural novel - one that's moved past the oohs and ahhs of the pulps and the grim racial politics of the more dire predecessors and is dedicated to the form as a subject for a novelistic lens. Very worth an investment.

You can't both want to make your story a careful and heartfelt plea for understanding and a really grotesque phantasmagoria of a horror thriller. It means you end up doing a whole bunch of explaining when it would have been better just to describe what was going on. 

Perhaps this is Ahlborn gravitating to the structure and length that suits her best - a brief novella tightly in the point of view of someone who's too far gone to really connect deeply with, yet someone who has enough of an inner life to draw us in to their story. The genre recapitulation, right down to the oft used Summer of Sam, is a bit by the book but Ahlborn has a clear love for it and a passion for her central character and that covers a multitude of sins. I keep giving Ahlborn books second chances, this one is the first to really get me understanding why. There's great potential here.

The last book in the Zeck trilogy, it makes a turn into the more rip roaring pulp hard boiled adventure than was normal for Wolfe. The unexpected nature of the adventure is a delight. Sure as hell it's better than anything Doyle wrote about Moriarty.

Noon finds his feet more in this one, and you start to feel the casual fun that the series will deliver more consistently. Slight, but pleasingly deft.

Quite a mix between the traditional Lovecraft tale and the darkly fantastic which have somewhat overtaken the tribute field in the last decade. Some (Barron in particular) are just a sluice of whatever they can think of, but most (including a harrowing descent into a decrepit mine) are both sympathetic and chilling. A truly excellent collection, well curated.

Although Bartlett is best in small doses, amply supported by any excuse to go into a rambling, homicidally hallucinogenic monologue, it's rare that he hits exactly in the bullseye of how long the story should be and how much it should be a story. If you're like me you'll find the first few stories (and the last one) just a phantasmagorical slog, but in between there's more than one which is a real delight that balances the need for the spew of horrific images with the desire for an actual character or even a comprehensible event. It's pretty much as good as you're gonna get.

One of the better "Zeck novels", in which Wolfe faces off against someone who, like him, is devoted to grammar, but is EVIL (a fantastic concept for a Wolfe recurring villain).  The plot becomes tangled up in the anti-communism of the era, which, although Archie and Wolfe both share it, for reasons obvious to anyone who has read even one of these novels, is treated more like an environmental hazard than a motivating consideration. In fact, the high ranking communists are presented rather as sympathetic as men - a couple of guys who can't really catch a break in midcentury America, and who have to have their defenses up 24-7.  Combine that with some of the most charming Archie-and-a-girl interactions in the whole series and you have a winner.