A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

A noir thriller with a single but crucial non-realistic element, which is that the narrator, Vic, can create perfumes which evoke memories. I say non-realistic because it’s not done with either magic or non-existent technology: Vic uses real methods of making perfume, and gets unreal results. The rules are consistent: the perfume only works on the person whose memory it is, and the memory has to involve a person who must be killed and used as an ingredient.

Vic owns an avant-garde perfumery, inherited via murdering the previous owner and making him into a perfume, and mostly does non-murdery, non-memory perfumes and runs the murder/memory business as a side gig. Unfortunately, when your side gig involves committing major crimes for terrible rich people, you are liable to end up in the exact sort of situation that Vic ends up in: blackmailed into committing multiple murders in the hope of creating a perfume that accesses other people’s memories—something which probably isn’t possible. To make the situation even more difficult, a private eye suspects and is following Vic for a previous perfume murder.

Vic decides that this situation needs accomplices—one to commit each murder—and selects three potential helpers, each of whom has been personally wronged by one of the prospective victims…

A confident, gripping novel, reminiscent in content of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, in tone of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Brian D’Amato’s Beauty, and in themes of all of them: obsession, murder, unreliable narrators, social satire, social climbing, and the drive for some kind of transcendence that destroys everything it touches.

If you want a novel about perfume to involve perfume and smells in general, this delivers: there’s a cast of characters listed by how they smell, each chapter has an epigraph of its keynote smells, and Vic has an extraordinarily good sense of smell and tells you what everything smells like. Vic is a completely terrible person (most of the characters are completely or at least largely terrible) but I enjoyed following them for the length of a novel.

I’m mostly avoiding pronouns for Vic as I’m not totally sure what they are. I personally think Vic is transmasc but again, not actually stated.

The supporting characters are classic noir types, updated and fleshed out and placed in a very specific New York City social context. The male patsy is a tailor by occupation and a sub by preference, in a poly relationship with the steely, ruthless woman who’s a photographer/bartender desperate to pay off his medical debt but alarmingly prompt to agree to murder as a way of doing it. The ground-down idealist is a barber about to get priced out of his shop.

Like Vic, they’re artists getting slowly crushed under late capitalism, but seen from a more jaundiced than idealistic perspective. Vic knows that artists needing patrons is not a new issue, and is willing to toss them and their art under the bus if it serves their ends. Vic gets involved with the poly couple and has some real feelings for them, but then again, the last person Vic was in a serious relationship with got turned into perfume.

This isn’t a comedy by any means, but there’s a strong element of deadpan absurdity and black humor running through it. The cast of characters, listed by what they smell like, has several puzzling elements which become clear late in the book, and I actually did laugh out loud when I realized what was going on.

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Like the other books Base Notes reminds me of, it’s more compelling in the first two-thirds. I’m more interested in the rise than the climactic fall, and more interested in the building of relationships than the breaking of them. It’s a bit over-long, which doesn’t help. The characters tend to be overly trusting at the wrong moments to facilitate the murders happening. But overall, it was very enjoyable.

Base Notes is a modern noir with several unusual twists, and it’s generally done very well. Donnelly is the author of the Amberlough series, which I haven’t read.

Time was a river made of quicksilver. It slipped through his grasp even as it enveloped him. Twenty became forty. Winter became spring, and before he knew it he was an old man burying his son and wondering where in the hell that river had taken him.

Ike Randolph, a Black man with a criminal past, never really accepted his gay son. Neither did Buddy Lee, a white man who also has a criminal past and whose son married Ike's. When their sons are murdered (not in a hate crime), the fathers join forces to try to make up in vengeance for the love they failed to show in life.

Folks like to talk about revenge like it’s a righteous thing but it’s just hate in a nicer suit.

I LOVED this book. I loved it even more than Blacktop Wasteland. It has a lot of similarities - a killer premise, fabulous noir metaphors, and great action sequences - but it's much more emotional and heartbreaking. Ike and Buddy Lee's relationship is fantastic, and the supporting characters (including, in a way, their sons) are vivid. I loved the black comedy of Ike, who owns a landscaping company, using all sorts of landscaping tools to wreak havoc.

Chopping up your first body is disgusting. Your second is tiresome. When you're doing your fifteenth, it's all muscle memory.

Razorblade Tears is sad and funny and violent and thought-provoking and very easy to read, though maybe not in one sitting as it's pretty intense. It takes tropes from pulp fiction and buddy action movies and noir, executes them beautifully so if you like those tropes you'll love what Cosby does with them, and also uses them to tell a wrenching story about grief and love.

Content notes: Violence, a child in danger, gross stuff involving Buddy Lee's lung condition, and depictions of racism, homophobia, and transphobia.

S. A. (Shawn) Cosby was a star at Bouchercon. He's phenomenally charismatic. He said that he wrote the book because a family member who was gay left town as soon as he turned eighteen, because of homophobia from his own family and community. So he wrote this book from the point of view of those other people, in the hope of getting through to them. He felt very comfortable getting inside the shoes of Ike and Buddy Lee, but consulted with gay friends on the portrayal of the gay characters and community.

He said, "I had a version of a scene where a fight breaks out at a gay bar, and in the first draft there's just the two people fighting, and everyone else just stands around shaking their heads in sad disapproval, like monks. I sent it to my friend and he said, 'No man, a brawl at a gay bar is like any barroom brawl.'"

This was one of Barack Obama's 20 favorite books of the year, but it was a huge bestseller even before that. It won best novel at Bouchercon, and that was fully deserved.

Cass lands in London without her beloved Konica, which she gave away in Hard Light, intending to meet up with Quinn, her obsession, love interest, and former hit man from Available Dark.

Given this timeline, it can’t be later than 2012 as the Iceland financial crisis is still going on, but she arrives in a London that seems eerily 2020, with a novel virus spreading from China and emboldened neo-Nazis marching in the streets.

It’s as good a way as any to deal with a timeline that was current when the series began and is now way behind, but it also fits in weirdly well with the plot of the book, in which Cass gets entangled with an ancient book bound in human skin that contains a code that can reprogram the human brain, which a programmer wants to use for her app intended to cure PTSD but which actually triggers it.

Modern Nazis fetishize ancient lore, musicians remix old folk songs for their latest releases, and old trauma never dies. Cass was raped and stabbed as a young woman, and everything came, not to a halt, but to the screeching skid before the crash. The assault lasted maybe twenty minutes if that, but her entire life since then has been stuck in that moment.

Past is present, old is new, and Cass has been trapped in time since the punk era, so it works surprisingly well for time to shift from 2010 to 2020 without remark.

I was doubtful about the rape backstory in the first book, but I’m completely onboard with it by now. It carries through the series and it’s very well-done and plausible.

There was one part of this book I did not enjoy, and that was Quinn. Cass is hitting bottom with her substance abuse, and Quinn is another addiction. Unfortunately, he’s an addiction with opinions. He spends the entire book telling her she’s delusional when she’s actually right. This isn’t quite as maddening as it could be, as he does have reasons to think that, he’s genuinely concerned about her drug use, and she ignores him anyway. But he’s still the person saying “Don’t do the thing we’re reading the book to see you do,” with a side of gaslighting. I really hope this is the last we see of him.

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Cass Neary, now wanted for questioning regarding the events of the previous book, is offered a nice sum of money to evaluate some photographs owned by a fashion photographer who's famous for a unique kind of lens flare. She can guess what sort of photos they are, tells him she won't do kiddie porn, and agrees to do it once she's assured it's not that. The photos are beautifully staged scenes of gruesome murders with the iconic lens flare. Cass thinks they're brilliant and says so, with no intention of looking any deeper into how he took them and why he was there.

However, a call from a long-lost lover and a few brutal murders send her to Iceland, which is both freezing and in the middle of a financial crisis. Everyone is depressed and cold, so it's perfect for Cass. But soon she gets involved in a complicated plot involving the murder photos, Icelandic folklore, Scandinavian death metal, and a cult.

The story really takes off at about the halfway or two-thirds point, when Cass is ditched in a blizzard and left for dead. In a moment which is both ingenious and darkly hilarious, ( Read more... )

I enjoy the deniable fantasy aspects of the series. This book had some slow-ish stretches in the middle but the mystery aspect worked better than in the first book, and the setting was very cool. The weird and morbid Scandinavian black metal scene was a very appropriate backdrop:

According to various sources, Euronymous took bits of Dead's skull and made them into necklaces for members of the black metal scene, including the band's drummer Hellhammer. Necrobutcher, the band's bassist, was so disgusted with Euronymous' actions that he left Mayhem. He was replaced by Burzum's Varg Vikernes, who murdered Euronymous two years later.

Dead, Dead, he was almost certainly not good in bed.

In this sequel to Money Shot, Angel Dare is working at a cheap diner under an assumed name after her stint in Witness Protection failed to protect her. She's out of the porn business, but not exactly out of the sex business: she describes how she got a place to stay by flirting with a man in a restaurant until he bought her a steak and took her home, where, she writes, I paid for my steak.

After a spectacularly ill-fated chance meeting with an old flame from her former life, Angel finds herself saddled with a very young man she feels responsible for, his washed-up MMA trainer, and a tide of violence that gets bigger and bigger until it swallows up everything in its path.

Very page-turny, very dark but not in the same way as Money Shot (less betrayal and everyone being horrible, more sudden shocking violence), set largely in the MMA world which was interesting but not quite as much for me as the porn world. But Angel still has a sex worker's mindset even when she's not specifically doing sex work, so that world is never really gone.

I briefly puzzled over why it took me so long to get to this book considering how much I liked Money Shot, and then checked the date of my review of the latter: November 2019. Right. 2020 is why.

It was Friday the thirteenth and yesterday’s snowstorm lingered in the streets like a leftover curse.

This was one of the books mentioned in Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks From Hell. I'd previously heard of it because it was adapted into a movie called Angel Heart which I've never seen but which generated a lot of media attention due to getting slapped with an X rating due, as far as anyone could tell, to a moderately explicit sex scene in which the actress was (gasp!) black.

Consequently, I had been long since spoiled for the general outlines of the plot. The book still held up very nicely, as 1) the overall plot is extremely heavily telegraphed anyway, 2) the actual pleasure of the book is less in surprises and more in prose and atmosphere. The prose, especially in the early parts, is absolutely delicious: horror by way of Raymond Chandler. Though every now and then it oversteps the thin line between the dark humor of noir metaphors and hilariously terrible metaphors, even then, the results are memorable:

Revelation hit me like an ice-water enema.

In 1959, private eye Harry Angel gets hired by the sinister and mysterious Louis Cyphre to track down the singer Johnny Favorite. Favorite had a meteoric pre-war rise to fame, then was severely wounded in WWII and supposedly was catatonic in a nursing home ever since. Only he's not in the home, and apparently hadn't been for some time. Angel, who was also severely wounded in WWII, tracks down Favorite's associates, only to find that they have a tendency to get murdered right before they can tell him more than cryptic hints...

All along the avenue, cotton candy stands, fun houses, and games of chance were tightly shuttered, like clowns without makeup.

Either this is the sort of thing you will like, or it is not. I bet by now you know which it is. I liked it a lot, though warning for racism of the "white teeth shining against black skin" variety. Also there is voodoo. I found that tolerable as the actual black characters all had their own agendas and motivations, and were as fleshed-out as the white characters; your tolerance may vary.

I breathed its fruity aroma and took a sip. The cognac slid like velvet fire across my tongue. I downed it in three quick swallows. It was old and expensive and deserved much better treatment, but I was in a hurry.

Falling Angel

Money Shot starts with a bang, with the heroine left for dead, shot and tied up and locked in the trunk of a car, struggling to break free. She’s Angel Dare, a middle-aged former porn star who now runs an adult modeling agency. An old friend from her porn days called her up and begged her for a favor, and things went downhill from there. Once she’s out of the car, she ends up on the run and looking for revenge…

Faust is a former pro dominatrix and peep show girl, and the way she writes about the porn and sex work business is wildly different from the way male writers who’ve never been involved in it, except maybe as a customer, do. The content is the same, but the attitude is wildly different; the gaze isn’t on women as objects, but on women as people.

The sex and porn workers are sharply evaluated in both human terms and how they approach their work; the consumers are examined with an even more merciless eye, to see what buttons to push to extract money while avoiding violence. But it’s not purely monetary or purely subsistence work; sexuality is also something Dare enjoys and is driven by and understands.

The world is dark, dark, darker than black. If someone seems awful, they are. If they seem okay, ten to one they either die or betray you. People are used and abused, bought and sold. But the prose style and insider’s attitude and Dare’s hard-bitten, wiseass narration made this a book I read in a single gulp.

He looked like one of the first three guys the hero has to fight before he can get to the real bad guy.

A dominatrix specializing in medical kink, whom Angel gets taken to for medical care since she can’t go to the cops, remarks of her security man, “I removed a bullet from his right thigh two years ago. That was amazing. Well, for me, anyway.”

Money Shot (Hard Case Crime Book 40)

There's some really good original fiction posted on AO3, so here's a few recs for original FF short stories. I think all of these came about via fic exchange prompts for original fiction with pairings like "Female mob boss/female advisor" or "queen/female knight."

Like the Knight Loves the Queen, by Scioscribe.

Smoking hot noir about a 1950s mob boss and her advisor/lover, with metaphors and atmosphere worthy of Raymond Chandler.

Kate had plucked Rose up from the perfume counter at a department store: she liked to say she came in for hyacinth and left with Rose. Rose said that was just a line. “She’s straight Chanel No. 5. No hyacinth. Rose and jasmine.”

Dear Patron, by Selden.

Hilarious and cleverly structured epistolatory story about a librarian and a patron with a very overdue library book. Tags include mild implied gore, mild implied eldritch abominations, and misuse of library books.

The following items have not been returned despite previous reminders and this may affect your borrowing privileges. Fines may be accruing. Please return or renew them as soon as possible. You can renew items and view your potential or actual fines (if applicable) by signing on to ECHOLAND (accessible via internet, Summoning circle, or blood ritual) and selecting My Account.

underneath the marula tree, by polkadot.

An African queen seeks out a champion in this thoughtful story with a lot of worldbuilding and characterization packed into a relatively short length.

Thandiwe was forty-six, and in the thirtieth year of her reign. She knew how to manage advisors (and make them all feel as if their opinion had been considered), how to lead armies (the trick was to not show fear, and have good generals), and how to balance a budget (very carefully).

Road, Wind, Cactus, by Neverwinter Thistle.

An atmospheric, gritty yet hopeful story about a post-apocalyptic coffeeshop, full of believable and intriguing details of exactly how that would be run and what (and who) it would serve.

There is a long highway that stretches through a desert with many names, and somewhere on it sits a coffee shop.

A noir mystery so well-written and cleverly structured that it overcame my usual dislike of reading about narcissistic hipster yuppies, not to mention my usual dislike of multiple plot elements which are too spoilery to mention.

Nick’s wife Amy has vanished without a trace, and Nick’s very first chapter contains unsettling musings about the beauty of her skull and the confession that he lied repeatedly in his interview with the police. His narration, which begins the day vanished and continues forward from there, alternates with Amy’s diary, which begins when they first met and also continues forward. Nick is clearly concealing some secrets, but did he kill her? Amy’s narration seems more subtly unreliable, detailing how she makes herself into a paper-thin image of the perfect woman, as portrayed in the shallow magazine quizzes she writes. Is she really fooling herself?

I guessed the main twist upon hearing the premise, and another about a quarter of the way into the book; if you’ve read a lot of mysteries, you will have come across these twists before, though probably not half so well-executed. So the pleasure for me was in the excellent prose and the suspense of the unfolding, in the details rather than the broad strokes. I knew where the story was headed, in general terms, but the smaller twists took me by surprise. I was up till 3:00 AM reading, and have no regrets.

Warning: even for noir, the characters are incredibly unlikable. I did care what happened to them, but not because I liked them.

You can read the beginning of the book here.

Giant spoilers lurk below.

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I have enjoyed every single one of Nicola Griffith’s books to date. They are very female-centric, with lesbian protagonists and a focus on mind-body interactions (often but not always involving martial arts), the sensual experience of the physical world, and the details of how things work – things being anything from carpentry to aikido to group dynamics. They do lack humor, but I don’t find that I miss it, since the other elements I mentioned above are particular interests of mine.

Ammonite is sf on the perennial theme of stranger in a strange land, in this case a woman who comes to a planet where a virus has killed all the men, but society survives. I have read a lot of “society of women” stories. With a few exceptions, when men write them the societies are fascistic, ant-like, and often prostrate themselves with gratitude at the arrival of male saviors. When women write them the societies tend to be individualist and bad-ass, or cooperative in an appealing, non-insectlike way. Griffith’s is cooperative in some ways, not in others, and has a strong streak of bad-ass. I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys worldbuilding sf with a focus on made-up cultures a la Ursula K. Le Guin or Eleanor Arnason.

Slow River I don’t recall terribly well except that it managed to hold my interest despite the fact that a lot of the plot involved, if I recall correctly, sewage treatment or something equally industrial and unpromising.

The Blue Place, Stay, and Always are a set of character studies masquerading as suspense thrillers about Norwegian-American Aud Torvingen, ex-cop, self-defense instructor, carpenter, and private investigator. Aud, who is practically perfect in all physical ways, is also a strange and closed-off person, beautifully attuned to the natural world and her own body but perpetually one beat off the rhythms of normal human interactions. But not so much so that she doesn’t have a love life. Both The Blue Place and Always feature sexy and romantic romances.

You can start with Always, the one I just read, but it will spoil earlier events. In alternating chapters, Aud has a disastrous experience teaching self defense in Atlanta (in the recent past) and investigates suspicious events involving a movie shoot in Seattle (in the present.) At first I was more interested in the self defense story, which features many useful pointers (Griffith is a former self-defense instructor), but I quickly became caught up in both after Aud has the unusual (to her) experience of being a victim when the set is sabotaged. I spent a very enjoyable Sunday lounging in the sun and reading this.

The Aud novels are well-written, smart, gripping, and even educational in an entertaining way. If you’re looking for lesbian heroines in stories that do not center around coming out or homophobia, or tough female protagonists who don’t hide or apologize for their competence, these books are for you.