Film Review: Honey Don't!

The second installment of Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke's lesbian B-movie trilogy is exactly what it describes itself as: very gay, very B-movie, and very noir

Honey Don't! is getting a lot of negative press and reviews out there, and I feel compelled to defend it. I was lucky enough to see an advanced screening to a packed house, and the middle-aged man sitting next to me walked out with 20 minutes left. Come on! That's ridiculous. It's a tight 90 minutes, the vibes are excellent, it's funny, and it's entertaining. Will it win Academy Awards? No. Will it enlighten you about the human condition like The Shawshank Redemption? Nope. What happened to having fun at the movies for an hour and a half and enjoying a cool character study?

To be fair, I knew this movie was made for me the moment I saw the trailer. Aubrey Plaza and Margaret Qualley in a lesbian neo-noir movie set in the desert by the makers of Drive-Away Dolls? Sign me up. Granted, as a lesbian myself, I feel biased in my interest in this film—other queer people may also agree. We're not used to leading romances in movies that often, so when one pops up, we'll defend it to the death. Hence my tome.

The main criticisms I've seen of Honey Don't! are that the plot goes nowhere and that nothing makes sense. To which I say, have you rewatched The Big Lebowski or Raising Arizona lately? I have, as they're some of my favorites, but it's not like those movies are crystal-clear plotwise. Some may feel it's a cop-out to enjoy a movie purely on ~vibes~, but I'm easy to please.

Honey Don't! is exactly what it was marketed as. It's a slightly comic ode to film noir, as it follows a stunning, cold-as-ice personal investigator as she gets involved in various murders and a religious cult in a sun-drenched, wind-swept Bakersfield, California. There's a subgenre of film noir (which literally means "dark film") called film soleil, which means "sunny film" and is characterized by hot, desert settings with powerful women and vicious crimes. You just swap out the dark, brooding alleys in Chicago for the sun-baked, wind-whipped desert streets of the west and sand-blasted old Camaros. It's kind of like how Midsommar still manages to be absolutely terrifying in broad daylight.

Film noir characters are also trope-based and predictable. Margaret Qualley as Honey O'Donahue is absolutely captivating, and I would read a dozen books that followed her hard-boiled adventures through rural California. She wears trousers with a purpose like Kate Hepburn, all hipbones and hands in pockets, and she struts through police stations and crime scenes like she was born to do it. I'm impressed by her screen presence in something like this film, but she's equally as captivating in something completely different tone-wise like The Substance. Her accent is light-years apart from her southern drawl in Drive-Away Dolls, veering more into a Bogart-ian, transatlantic lilt that's fun.

The film revolves around Honey's investigation of a young woman's mysterious murder, and as she pokes around, she manages to get involved with a French-financed sex cult and a surprise serial killer. There are more red herrings in Honey Don't than the tinned fish section of a Swedish Bi-Lo, but that's half the fun. It's also way gorier than I anticipated.

In his article "A Guide to Film Noir," Roger Ebert lists out some of the defining tenets of the genre, and the one most applicable to Honey Don't! is rule #9: "Relationships in which love is only the final flop card in the poker game of death." Aubrey Plaza, starring as a timid police officer, strikes up an affair with Honey throughout the movie. Their romance and chemistry are real, and their physical relationship in a desert town full of dangers, sleaze bags, and betrayals reminds me of last year's Love Lies Bleeding with Katy O'Brien and Kristen Stewart.

But in a classic film noir twist, it turns out Plaza is the real killer, but not before several lurid sex scenes that ratchet up the tension in the film. Aubrey Plaza is fantastic in this role, as she's playing a sort of trashy and sleazy character that's a bit different from her usual parts. Honey, cunning private dick that she is, discovers that Plaza was, in fact, the culprit behind all of the missing women in town, and in a final act of dysfunction, is forced to kill her in self-defense. I didn't see it coming, so I thought the twist was good. See Ebert's rule #3: "Women who would just as soon kill you as love you, and vice versa."

All my thoughts on Honey Don't! probably won't convince anyone to change their mind who saw it and didn't like it, but I do hope I can inspire folks who are a little more forgiving in their approach to movies to give it a shot—at the very least give it a chance when it hits streaming. It feels like a modern Raymond Chandler short story, something you can stay on the surface level of and still enjoy, even if the plot isn't locked up tight or the performances won't win Oscars. It's got dark humor, and Chris Evans as a horny sex preacher at a church called Four-Way, giving his best Righteous Gemstones impersonation of a sinful cult leader, is top-tier stuff

Honey Don't! may not be for everyone, but I'll keep defending this sun-drenched mess. I watched it a second time and liked it even more, but it's a shame folks will keep walking out of theaters when they go to see it.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10 for straight people, 9/10 for lesbians.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Microreview [book]: Whitesands by Johann Thorsson

A true creeper 

Thorsson is an Icelandic author and former contributor to Book Riot. His stories have appeared in Fireside Fiction and The Apex Book of World SF 4, among other places. Whitesands is his first novel, published in the US by Headshot Books. It is a supernatural thriller, skirting the line between hard-boiled detective fiction and horror - but approaches the genre in an unusual way. 

Whitesands tells the story of John Dark, a police detective in an unnamed American city. Dark and his partner Monique Moreno were once known as the best of the best, but have been reassigned to desk duty after an unsanctioned attempt to find Dark's missing daughter went wrong. They receive their first true case in months, a bizarre, ritualistic murder whose apparent perpetrator, despite clear physical evidence that he did it, has no apparent motive and zero memory of the deed. They are given the case because it's a slam dunk, an easy way to start rebuilding their reputations. But something about the video footage is off. There is, of course, no question as to whether the man committed the crime - but Dark comes to suspect that something else may be afoot...

I will say no more, because part of the fun is how Thorsson slowly introduces the concept of the supernatural into what up to that point reads like a fairly straightforward, fast-paced work of hardboiled detective fiction. To be honest, I'm a much bigger fan of hardboiled detective fiction than I am of supernatural horror, so I probably would have been perfectly content to let things evolve as they were. In this case, however, the horror elements both compliment and enhance the core thriller narrative. 

There are other details to note as well. For one thing, Whitesands takes place in an unnamed American city. Local color and lore are key components to the American detective novel (think: Chandler's Los Angeles, Hammett's San Francisco). The detectives are also presented in generic terms - their names, "Dark" and "Moreno" signaling with little subtlety that we are firmly in noir territory. But while "generic" is usually a pejorative term, in this case it's set up - since this is decidedly not a generic detective story. 

The book also has excellent pace. At several points, I made myself stop reading so I could better digest what I'd just taken in. But the urge to continue on was constant. This is the kind of book you could happily devour on a long plane ride, but there are definite advantages to taking your time. 

Without giving too much away, Whitesands ends on a cliffhanger - akin to the end of a TV season. I'm fine with that, as I intend to read the sequel when it comes out. But some readers may wish for more resolution, even if major storylines continue. 

All that said, Whitesands is not a perfect book. There are elements, like John Dark's preternatural instincts, that are referred to but not really developed in any way. And Moreno sometimes presents more like a vehicle for Dark's character exposition than a fully-rendered character in her own right - though the hints we do get about her back story are very intriguing. Hopefully this is explored more in later volumes. Finally, though I did enjoy the "Everywherescity, USA" approach to world building that Thorsson takes, there are times when it seems to come less from intentionality and more from a lack of the kind of intimate familiarity that a native or deeply embedded transplant would have. Yet the fact that these moments are rare is also notable. 

Overall, Whitesands is a brisk, enjoyable read that I recommend to fans of both detective fiction and supernatural horror. 

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for the slow introduction of supernatural elements, which is refreshing; +1 for brisk pace

Penalties: -1 for elements that could have been developed further

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10. Well worth your time and attention. 

***

POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a
Feather founder/administrator, since 2012. 

Summer Reading List 2020: The G

It's that time of year again (which of course you already know since we've been running these all week long). But ever since 2012, when I started our annual Summer Reading tradition, it's been the post series I've most looked forward to. After all, what's summer for if not sitting outside in the warm sun, beverage of choice in hand, and the pure joy of getting lost in other lives and worlds. So without further ado, here is my list of books for 2020 - a year that needs every last bit of joy there is.   

1. Hothouse, Brian Aldiss.

Aldiss wrote one of my favorite SF novels, Non-Stop, and one of my favorite short stories, "Supertoys Last All Summer Long." Hothouse is a far-future novel where a growing (i.e. dying) sun has triggered a massive vegetative bloom and humans are among the last fauna left. Hothouse promises to be very weird and unnerving. (Spoiler alert, as I'm 3/4 of the way through: it's very weird and unnerving.)

2. Children of Ruin, Adrian Tchaikovsky

Children of Time is one of the best SF books I've read in years - the kind of "hard SF" novel that used to win Hugo Awards, just without the dreary libertarianism. Children of Ruin is the sequel, which if reports are to be believed, picks up exactly where the first one left off.

3. The Mothman Prophecies, John Keel.

Do I believe in UFO visitations? No. Not really. Do I like the idea of UFOs, alien visitations and all that fun stuff? Hells yes. Also, this book will apparently melt your brain, so there's that too.

5. Your House Will Pay, Steph Cha.

Korean-American author Cha is one of the hottest names in crime fiction - I read Follow Her Home and found it to be a fresh new spin on the hardboiled detective formula. Your House Will Pay is much more ambitious, taking on the riots and racial tensions of 1990s Los Angeles.

5. The Vanished Birds, Simon Jimenez.

Paul DiFilippo recently called this a "touching, bold, surprising, gorgeous debut novel—a certain manner of postmodern space opera." I like everything about that description, so count me ready to blast off into the far future.

6. Pedal Crush: Stompbox Effects for Creative Music Making, Kim Bjørn.

My nerdliness stretches into many a domain, and the latest obsession is the wonderful world of boutique guitar pedals. These boxes, often handmade, can transform any sound in all kinds of wonderful ways. Plus they are just fun to look at. Cue a future We Rank 'Em that only Vance and I (and NOAF alum Philippe) will want to read...

***

POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a
Feather founder/administrator, since 2012. 

Microreview [film]: Mute, directed by Duncan Jones

A Gorgeous Onion!

Jones, Duncan. Mute. 2018

'Tis available worldwide (only?) on Netflix, as of 2018.

The name 'Duncan Jones' will immediately evoke, in the minds of the small but powerful(ly voiced) group of cine-nerds, the masterful 2009 film Moon, and/or the respectable cerebral (get it?!) thriller Source Code of 2011. Garden-variety meathead non-nerds, on the other hand, might recall him as the director of the 2016 video game-to-film adaptation of Warcraft—you know, the movie that absolutely no one was eagerly awaiting. No matter your nerd credentials, then, you probably associate Duncan Jones with a certain cinematographic pizzazz, and like me, your expectations were probably quite high for his latest brainchild, the only-on-Netflix 2018 futuristic neo-noir Mute. The question is, were those expectations met?

Nah. But before we get to the bad news, I’ll give the good news. The film is breathtakingly beautiful, leaving no rock of the delectably dirty futuristic Berlin unturned, and what’s more, it is full of quirky little visual predictions of what the world will be like in twenty years (you know, mini-drones delivering food through the drone-only doggy door on windows, etc.). Plus, Paul Rudd was, in my opinion, an excellent casting choice, as his snarky-but-harmless star persona helps mask the darkness lurking deep within his character here.

With a face/attitude like that, you just know (/hope) that Rudd's character will come to a sticky end...

But fans expecting or hoping for the same level of storytelling as was present in Moon, or even Source Code, will likely leave the theater their living rooms somewhat disappointed. The story is fairly predictable from the get-go, and certain things are never adequately explained (like how a bartender, even an unusually tall and lanky one, can use a bedpost to beat down entire rooms full of heavily armed professional thugs, but for the visual flair Jones brings, I’m still willing to watch even rather nonsensical scenes!).

It turns out that Mute is an onion: each layer of the story is delicious, but peel them all away to get to the core and you find…nothing. Side note: I’ve never really understood the high value placed on the onion as a metaphoric device. Lots of things have layers, but shouldn’t the metaphoric object get progressively better/more profound as one works one’s way further in? It seems clear to me that, in the realm of vegetal metaphors, the artichoke is king, because while the outer layers might be palatable, the heart is the greatest prize. This is all to say that Mute feels like an artichoke without a heart (i.e., an onion), or a story with nothing especially profound to say (the title’s making more sense, eh?).

Life is like a box of artichokes--kind of a pain, but on balance worth the effort!

Bottom line: you should totally watch this film, but Moon fans should temper their expectations, because this is no artichoke; it’s a beautiful, shallow onion. But it’s a really good onion, like maybe a Vidalia onion, which means there is only one question:

Well said, Shrek!

The Math:

Objective assessment: 5/10

Bonuses: +1 for peppering the film with thought-provoking suggestions of the near-future, +1 for Jones’ flair for the cinematographically dramatic

Penalties: -1 for being such a let-down compared to Moon (and, in a sense, even Source Code)

Nerd coefficient: 6/10 “Worth watching, but the flaws are hard to ignore”
 

[Score seem harsh? Not at all: see here for why this is better than average!]

This message brought to you by Zhaoyun, demigod of nerdery, who is currently halfway through a series on high-profile Netflix projects of potential appeal to nerds of the world (unite!), and has been a reviewer for Nerds of a Feather since 2013.

Altered Carbon, Episodes 1-3

Netflix's new science fiction show, Altered Carbon, is based on a novel of the same name by Richard K. Morgan. It's basically a mashup of neo-cyberpunk, detective noir, milSF and techno thriller. Since I have particular interests in the first two parts of that equation, Altered Carbon looked to be right up my alley. So I decided to commit to 3 episodes, after which point I'd take stock. Three episodes in and I like it enough to continue. It's not quite as good as I'd hoped, however.

Takeshi Kovacs is, or rather was, a kind of super soldier known as an envoy. Envoys were part of an insurrection against the hegemonic polity, the Protectorate. The insurrection failed and the envoys were "put in ice." However, in the future your mind, memories and soul are stored on a "stack"--a kind of hard drive that is surgically inserted into your body. As long as the stack isn't damaged, it can be taken out of a dead body and inserted into a new "sleeve" (i.e. a body). Religious types refuse to be re-sleeved, believing that it prevents the soul from ascending to heaven. Pretty much everyone else who can afford to do it, does.

So Kovacs is re-sleeved into the massive, jacked body of Swedish actor Joel Kinneman. This is done at the behest of ultra-rich "meth" (i.e. meta-human) Laurens Bancroft, who wants Kovacs to investigate the "murder" of his previous sleeve. Unlike the plebs, Bancroft doesn't need a stack to resleeve, nor does he even need a sleeve. His mind, memories and soul are uploaded every 48 hours to a satellite, which can then beam it back into a cloned body. But he was "murdered" just before the periodic upload, which means Bancroft has no memory of the event or the events leading up to it. Oh the humanity. In any event, most people think Bancroft committed suicide; Bancroft is convinced he was murdered. His femme fatale wife, Miriam Bancroft, takes an immediate interest in Kovacs, as does Bay City detective Kristin Ortega. A mystery ensues.

First, the things I like. It's a very pretty show--especially the sweeping vistas like the one above, but also some of the interiors, like Bancroft's mansion in the clouds and The Raven, which is the hotel where Kovacs lives. I also really like some of the supporting characters, like Poe (the AI who runs The Raven) and Ortega. And the show is commendably diverse. Kovacs is supposed to be half Japanese and half Hungarian (judging by the name), and his partner is black. Ortega is Mexican; her partner Aboud is an Arab Muslims; their captain is Japanese. I like to see futures where everyone is mixed up and the social categories of today don't have quite the same meaning several hundred years into the future.

I also liked how the immortal lives of the wealthy, in secluded compounds at cloud level, serves as a literalized metaphor for the inequality that increasingly defines most societies. In fiction, I often grow weary of literalized metaphors, but they work on TV. And of course, the existence of stacks and sleeves brings up interesting questions of how we'd act if death were not a guarantee. And finally, the show features good acting, pace and atmosphere.

But there are a few things that keep me from really loving the show. Kinneman grows on you as the series progresses, but there are moments where he comes off like a cross between Dolph Lundgren and Kevin Sorbo. The super soldier also doesn't quite fit the noir mold. Not that anyone is required to stick the old formula, but the genius of Philip Marlowe is that he can take a punch as well as dish one out, and that he's always outgunned and so has to use his wits to stay alive. Kovacs, on the other hand, can destroy anyone and everyone. Others might like this setup, but for I prefer the Marlowe style of detective.

Then there's the violence and nudity. Actually I don't really mind the nudity--it's just the human body,  after all. And I can handle the show's level of gore and splatter too. It's the intersection of the two that bothers me. So much "prestige TV" centers violence against women--Game of Thrones, Westworld and so forth and so on. Altered Carbon does as well. There's an awful lot of naked women being hurt by men. Yes, it happens in the real world and yes, there is violence against men too. But the brutalized are almost exclusively all women, at least 3 episodes in.

I'd stop short of calling the show misogynistic. There are plenty of well crafted, three dimensional female characters; and I *think* the show is trying to say that violence against women is bad. At some point, though, enough is enough. And there's a cumulative effect of all these shows using violence against women to illustrate just how dark and depraved these fictional worlds are. It would be nice if, for a change, it weren't centered.

While not perfect, I did like Altered Carbon enough to continue watching. So that's something.

***

POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a
Feather founder/administrator, since 2012. 

Microreview [book]: Follow Her Home by Steph Cha

Millennial Noir?

Genre fiction is, in a sense, a covenant between writer and reader. The writer agrees to abide by certain conventions, which allow the reader to make certain assumptions--assumptions that, in turn, facilitate the quick and easy digestion of the narrative. This is not always true, as genre can be both highly experimental and surprisingly artful. But it is often true, and it is more true of crime fiction than other categories of genre. There is the unsolved event, the intriguing clue, the snowballing investigation, the red herring and--finally--the big reveal. On top of that, of course, there is the personal narrative, which must link the central mystery to some momentous event in the investigator's life, in turn rendering the narrative--and by extension the book--relatable on a human level.

This structure of tropes not only features in most crime fiction; it defines what is and isn't crime fiction. For crime writers, then, the devil really is in the details, with standouts measured by a delicate balancing act between executing the tried-and-true and innovating on the margins.

Steph Cha's Follow Her Home is an interesting debut precisely in what it does on the margins of what is otherwise a highly conventional detective story. Juniper Song is an unemployed, Raymond Chandler-obsessed millennial dilettante living in mid-city Los Angeles. At a party, her friend Luke convinces her to do some snooping, to see if his father--a wealthy lawyer--is sleeping with a junior associate at the firm, who is present at the party and near-blackout drunk. Song drives her home but is then summarily knocked unconscious by an unknown assailant. When she wakes up and retrieves her car, she discovers the body of another junior associate in her trunk. She then receives a mysterious phone call from a man who threatens to harm her family if she tells the police, and also seems to know about her sister's suicide--a deeply traumatic event that Song rarely discusses with anyone. Rather than back off, however, Song digs deeper into an unfolding mystery with disturbing parallels to her sister's death.

By the usual metrics, Follow Her Home is a pretty ho-hum debut. The mystery is not only formulaic, but nonsensical with alarming frequency. Characters repeatedly implicate themselves for no apparent reason other than to move the plot along, use violence when it would not advisable for someone trying to hide secrets to use violence (for example the unknown assailant who makes the murder he just committed known to Song, despite nothing otherwise linking him to the crime)--and then fail to use it when it would be. What's more, the motivations of several major characters remain unclear even at the book's end. Oh, and the prose often struggles to establish the appropriate mood (especially in those moments when we are supposed to feel Song's fear).

At the same time, Follow Her Home is quite a fun read. Song is a likable and relatable protagonist, and even if Cha is not exactly Chandler, the novel is briskly paced and hard to put down. And as much as the mystery presents problems for the reader, Song's personal narrative--the story of what happened to her sister--is very compelling.

Thematically, the book explores the "Asian girl fetish" and its impact on Asian women, and this I also thought was very well done. Cha differentiates between interracial coupling and the kind of toxic race fetishism that infantilizes Asian women or categorizes them as "highly-sexual-but-submissive" objects that exist to serve (non-Asian) male desires. Cha explores how this kind of racialized fetishism has impacted Song (who is, of course, an Asian woman).

But what really struck me was how clearly and unobtrusively Cha sets out the issues. This is not "message-forward" fiction where the story is a delivery system for the social message, but rather a piece of fiction that effectively addresses a social issue in such a way as to enhance the story. And Song's perspective feels instantly relatable, in the sense that you quickly come to understand how the issue looks through her eyes. In fact, I'd wager that readers who have never thought about this issue with any depth are likely to see things differently after finishing Follow Her Home.

In the end, Follow Her Home is a light, breezy but somewhat clunky detective story that nevertheless manages to stick with you due to the charisma of its protagonist and deft handling of a complex social issue.


The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for Song and her backstory; +1 for the deft exploration of complex social issues.

Penalties: -1 for but it's otherwise pretty forgettable; -1 for and then there's all the stuff related to the central mystery that makes no sense when you really think about it.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10. "Enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore."


***

POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a
Feather founder/administrator, since 2012. 

Reference: Cha, Steph. Follow Her Home [Minotaur, 2013]

Microreview [book]: A Borrowed Man by Gene Wolfe

Almost Human

E.A. Smithe is a reclone; he was an author but he died. The library system brought him back to life, as well as many other authors, poets, and artists, and they loan him out to people for any variety of reasons. Collette Coldbrook needs him to help her solve a mystery; her brother and father have recently died under strange circumstances, and her most relevant piece of evidence involves one of Smithe's books. 

A Borrowed Man deftly blends a futuristic setting with a noir style. Collette and Smithe are pursued from the start by unknown individuals who may have been involved in the Coldbrook family deaths, or may be trying to collect on her father's debts. Smithe isn't treated like a "full human" because he's a reclone, so the story has a lot of elements of "what makes a man?" blended in with the central mystery surrounding the Coldbrook family. Complicating the story, Smithe was recloned from a point before he wrote the novel Collette has in her possession, so he doesn't particularly know its significance either. When I started it, the story sank its hooks in deep. 

But halfway through, it loses the plot. The story is told from the perspective of Smithe looking back at the events of the past, so when a significant character goes away, we (the readers) lose a valuable point of view. Without them, Smithe is almost robotic in his behavior. His programming takes over and he starts doing things that take us away from the mystery. It eventually gets back on track, but there's a strong feeling of lost momentum. The conclusion is satisfactory, but it has a lot of knots and a fair amount of handwaving.

I spent a lot of the second half of the book scratching my head. I couldn't tell where we were going or why. The strong start convinced me to see it through to the end, but it shouldn't have nearly lost me in the first place. It's a net positive, but barely.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 intriguing story and core mystery

Penalties: -1 throws the whole story off the rails halfway through

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10 (still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Wolfe, Gene A Borrowed Man [Tor, 2015]  

Contrast

[Contrast, Compulsion Games, Focus Home Interactive, 2014]

Like Nothing Else

As the heading implies, Contrast is like nothing you've ever played before. Of course, there are elements of the game that resemble titles you have in your library, but it manages to introduce a totally new dimension in gameplay that has never been previously attempted. The film noir aspects and the idea of a broken family are nothing new. However, the use of light and shadow as a means to get around the setting, tell the story, and solve puzzles is an entirely new mechanic in gaming. It is somewhat difficult to explain, so I'll just show you. Take a look at this video and you'll see what I mean. Dawn, the protagonist and playable character, can "shift" into and out of shadows. She can (and must) manipulate light sources in order to create shadows and complete levels. 

The Story

As I said before, you play as Dawn, the sexy yet silent "imaginary" friend of Didi. Didi is a young girl of 7 or 8 whose mother is a lounge singer and aspiring star named Kat. Her father, Johnny, has been kicked out of the house for perpetrating one too many offenses against his family in the form of cons, schemes, and various other less-than-successful sketchy ventures.

I won't get too in-depth as the story is one place that this game really shines. I will just say that Didi enlists Dawn and her ability to "shift" between the three-dimensional world of color and the dark versus light, two-dimensional world of the shadows to ensure that Johnny's most recent plan doesn't falter and their family can become a single functioning unit once again.

One thing I will say is that I especially liked the ideas that were introduced about the multiverse and the possibility that either Didi, Dawn, or maybe even all of the characters exist in different dimensions. This fascinating theory was furthered by the fact that the entire game takes place in a sort of floating city like that found in BioShock: Infinite. Although it was never really explained why you were walking around in a town that was surrounded by places you could easily fall off of without so much as a hint of a guardrail or other protective apparatus, that only added to the sense that you were operating in another dimension than the one we all inhabit.  

Gameplay

Didi and Dawn are the only two characters that appear in three dimensions in the game. All of the other characters only appear as shadows, even though Didi responds to them as though they were three-dimensional flesh-and-blood people. This also serves to increase the player's sense that they are playing in an environment that exists between dimensions, or at least one that is alternate from our own.

Most of the actual game centers around Dawn's ability to "shift" between two and three dimensions. At times she walks the streets and alleys like any normal character would in a game. At other times, she is flattened into a shadow and must navigate using only other shadows as one would use a sidewalk for transportation, walking thirty feet up along walls as though they were solid ground. At times, Dawn must manipulate light sources in the third dimension in order to navigate the second. Other times, she uses existing character's shadows to move around the world of Contrast. Much of this navigation is done as part of a puzzle that must be solved to further the story. It is an extremely creative, if a little hard to grasp, method of maneuvering about the environment. 

Control Scheme

This was one place where I really felt that this game fell short. The controls were as squirrelly as they could be. If Grand Theft Auto is like trying to drive a tank, this is like herding cats. Getting Dawn to go where you wanted her to could be an exercise in futility. I died dozens of times when she simply fell to her death due to poor controls. Getting Dawn to do exactly what you wanted her to do often required repeated attempts and sometimes the simplest of movements were maddeningly difficult.

Conclusives

While this game has its flaws, they are easily out-shined by its unique approach to gameplay and the new methods it uses to the traditional platforming puzzle game. The story draws you in and you actually care about Didi and her family, becoming fascinated by their lives and emotionally attached to the outcome. The mystery contained in the world of Contrast is one that still has me considering all the possibilities it presents with regard to multiple universes and dimensions. Multiverse theory is one that has always intrigued me and this game does a wonderful job of presenting some of its details while maintaining a plausible and heart-warming plot at its core. 

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for creating a new type of gameplay mechanic that is unique and original.

Penalties: -1 for game controls that had me cursing like a sailor at times. 

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 - A mostly enjoyable experience. 

Summer Reading List: The G

Today The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a Feather founder/administrator--shares his fantasy-heavy Summer Reading List! He tells us ("he" being "me," and "us" being "you") that this is the order in which he intends to read the books, but cautions that lists are meant to be tinkered with.

1. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer [Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014]

Since it's technically summer, I can include the book I'm currently reading--the first installment in VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, which centers on an expedition into the mysterious Area X, where a calamity of unknown origin has upended many of the base assumptions of how reality is supposed to behave. So far it's a dense and extremely well-written slice of the New Weird, a subgenre I'm not that well acquainted with, but clearly have some affinity for. I've got the sequel, Authority, as well, so I might just power through.

2. Sworn in Steel by Douglas Hulick [Ace/ROC, 2014]

I've made no secret of my affection for Hulick's debut Among Thieves, and I hear from reputable sources that the long-awaited sequel is top-notch. Not that I'm surprised--Drothe has been made a Gray Prince of the Kin, but acquired a host of powerful enemies in the process: what could possibly go wrong? With Among Thieves, Hulick showed that he has a knack for pace and writes just about the best sword fight you could ever imagine. Every nerd's summer reading list needs at least one straight-up adventure, and this one promises to be smarter and more rewarding than most. 

3. Artemis Awakening by Jane Linskold [Tor, 2014]

I have to admit this wasn't really on my radar until recently, but from what I gather, Artemis Awakening is one of those "homages to the masters" (in this case, Andre Norton and C. L. Moore) that updates and problematizes rather than reproduces the tropes and stock devices of the source material. It's anthropological "lost world" SF too, and that's a niche I quite enjoy. Plus it might inspire me to re-read Forerunner!

4. Kansas City Noir by Steve Paul, ed. [Akashic, 2012]

Akashic has made a name for themselves with their municipal-themed anthologies of short noir fiction. And if you know Kansas City like I do, you know it's got all the elements in place for some serious grit. Editor Paul assembled a great collection of local authors, including Daniel Woodrell, Grace Suh, Nancy Pickard and J. Malcolm Garcia, so I'm confident this will be a good one. Bonus points to the first author who recognizes the superiority of Gates & Sons BBQ. 

5. The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley [Angry Robot, 2014]

Hurley is best known for her "bugpunk" space opera series the Bel Dame Apocrypha; now she switches focus to epic fantasy. This will be my first taste of Hurley's fiction, but if reputation is anything to go by, I expect it to be heavy on the grit, but without a lot of the stuff people complain about when they complain about gritty/grimdark fantasy. Well, some of it at least. It wouldn't be gritty otherwise, would it?  

6. Hot Lead, Cold Iron by Armi Marmell [Titan, 2014]

I don't usually go in for urban fantasy, but the review on Bookworm Blues got me hooked. See, my big problem with UF is that I just can't suspend disbelief when the magic and monsters and such are in the hear-and-now. I know, I know--if anything epic fantasy is less believable. But for whatever reason I can imagine wizards more easily when there are castles and swords and such. So this is me broadening internal SF/F horizons. Plus I hear the fantasy bits are restrained, and that's a plus for me.





The Book that Should Be on the List, but Isn't

The Shadow Throne by Django Wexler [Ace/ROC)

If you recall, Wexler's The Thousand Names was one of my Hugo ballot. And make no mistake--I am very excited to read the sequel. Unfortunately, the book has not found its way to me yet. If or when it does, then it will instantly shoot up to the top of the list.








The Book that Is Most Likely to Supplant Something on the List, Given a Shift in Mood

Defenders by Will McIntosh [Orbit, 2014]

Another one I can thank Sarah from Bookworm Blues for (she calls it "too good to rate"). And this tale of what happens to soldiers bred to kill once the war is finished does sound like a serious page-turner. The only reason it didn't make my list is, well, the other books. Luckily there are three months of summer ahead of me, and I tend to read a lot while school is out of session.

Microreview [book]: Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto

Pretty but Uninspiring

To feed my borderline unhealthy obsession with True Detective, I tracked down a copy of show creator Nic Pizzolatto's crime novel Galveston. I wasn't exactly sure what to expect, though "gritty," "artsy" and "weird" all seemed plausible--particularly after reading Dennis Lehane's glowing review in the New York Times. Turns out Galveston is plenty gritty, but not nearly as ambitious or abstract as I wanted it to be.

Galveston tells the story of Roy Cady, an enforcer for a mid-level gangster in New Orleans. Cady finds himself in a tight situation and so hightails it to the eponymous city on the Gulf with hard case Roxy and a young child in tow.

Galveston is fairly classic noir, but as I outlined in my Friday Five for pornokitsch, noir basically comes in three flavors:

1. The Hardboiled Thriller, in which a stubborn and ethical hero pushes back against dark and corrupt world, ultimately settling for small, symbolic victories against a backdrop of general hopelessness (e.g. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler).

2. The Sadsack Tragedy, in which a well-intentioned but weak-willed antihero attempts but is unable to escape the clutches of said dark and corrupt world (e.g. James M. Cain, Jim Thompson).

3. The Revenge Fantasy, in which a sociopathic product of the dark and corrupt world seeks revenge against its agents, yet is unconcerned with changing or improving that world (e.g. Patricia Highsmith, Richard Stark). 

The genius of Galveston is that Pizzolatto keeps us guessing as to which one Cady's story will turn out to be. And the book is beautifully written too--sharp, evocative and peppered with passages that are, quite simply, dazzling.

Unfortunately, Galveston often feels weighed down by reliance on the tropes of the genre--the tough-but-caring criminal, the hard case (yet vulnerable!) love interest, the innocent child, etc. It isn't that Galveston is bad--it's not at all; it's that Galveston plays things a bit too safe. In other words, it's no True Detective.


The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for Pizzolatto's gorgeous prose.

Penalties: -1 for "meh."

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10. "Enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore."

***

POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a
Feather founder/administrator (2012).

Pizzolatto, Nic. Galveston: A Novel [Scribner, 2011]

Microreview [book]: The Twenty Year Death by Ariel S. Winter

The New Pulp landscape is littered with tributes to the dead masters of the genre. But banking the fame of classic source material is a difficult trick to pull off. After all, why would I want to read a second-rate Chandler when I can just read Playback for the ninth time? And as far as paeans to Jim Thompson are concerned, well, you can just ask Philippe how those are going.

Fortunately, Ariel Winter's The Twenty Year Death [2012, Hard Case Crime] isn't just an homage to the classics--it's three. "Malvineau Prison" is straight Simenon. While Winter's prose lacks the architectural minimalism of the original Maigret novels, pretty much everything else is spot on. The second novel, "Falling Star," is Philippe Marlowe reimagined. Paradoxically, this was both my favorite and least favorite of the three. That is, I enjoyed it the most, because Chandler is my favorite crime fiction author (and arguably the best writer genre fiction has ever produced), but it was also the least successful at capturing the magic of the original source material. I guess reading it felt a bit like watching a really fucking good Joy Division cover band: for a while you can almost pretend it's really Ian Curtis up there on stage, but then the little things remind you that it's not, and instead it's some other dude who sounds like him but lacks that certain something that made him so special in the first place. But of course, who does?

"Police at the Funeral," by contrast, is a remarkably successful rendering of Jim Thompson. Hell, Philippe might even appreciate it. Of course, I'm not as big a Jim Thompson fan as he is, but this one did make me feel tense and grimy and flipped out just like The Killer Inside Me.

If that was all there was to it, I'd rate the three novels that make up The Twenty Year Death as solid, enjoyable books suitable for most noir fans. But Winter ties these three homages together with a meta-narrative that serves as both commentary on perspectivity in crime fiction and on the evolution of the genre across the three decades of its golden age. American writer Shem Rosenkrantz serves as the linchpin, and we watch his role evolve from witness to victim to perpetrator. The effect is subtle enough  not to take away from enjoyment of any of the book's constituent parts, but provides significant rewards for the reader when all is said and done.

...and kudos to Winter for demonstrating that experimental fiction can still be accessible.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for getting so many things right about the source material; +1 for the meta-narrative, which ties everything together in such a nifty and original way.

Penalties: -1 for the unavoidable "why am I not just reading The Big Sleep again moments."

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10. "Well worth your time and attention."

[To learn more about our non-inflated scoring system, in which the average is a 5/10, click here.]

Microreview [anthology]: Staten Island Noir

Staten Island Noir
Edited by Patricia Smith
Akashic Books

The Meat

Allow me to cover my ass at the outset: I have never been to State Island. In fact, I can’t imagine any reason why I would ever in my life visit the place. But like all of New York, I know something about it without actually knowing the place. And from what I can tell, it’s a bit like the Valley, maybe even like my hometown Bakersfield. It’s beyond the city proper, unaffected by the speed and schemes of urban life, a few years’ behind—maybe a decade. It’s a world apart. Seemingly desolate and probably so. And apparently it’s a pretty crappy place to be a crook.

Staten Island Noir, part of Akashic Books’ Noir series, is a rather enjoyable anthology of crime fiction set in…you know where. I am not a huge fan of anthologies. I prefer collections of works by a single author. Risk is minimized, you have an idea from the first few stories whether or not the rest are worth reading. But an anthology is rife with danger. Let’s say I hate the first three stories. How do I know that the rest won’t suck?

Fortunately, State Island Noir didn’t suck. In fact, I enjoyed nearly every entry. This isn’t necessarily a ringing endorsement: I may have liked the collection due largely to lowered expectations. And though I found it highly readable, roughly half of the stories were not exactly memorable.

There were, however, some real gems in this collection that deserve mention. My personal favorite was Binnie Kirshenbaum’s “Assistant Professor Lodge,” not merely for its academic setting—it is a wonderfully subtle murder story with the best ending of any story in the collection—but I liked mainly it because of its academic setting. In “…spy verse spy..”, Todd Craig creates a very Wire-esque urban backdrop for his wonderfully constructed old-hood-seeking-revenge tale. Linda Nieves-Powell gets the unsettling award for her nuanced treatment of love, race, and murder in “The Fly-Ass Puerto Rican Girl from the Stapleton Projects.” And Ted Anthony’s entry about an incompetent hitman, “A User’s Guide to Keeping Your Kills Fresh,” and Ashley Dotson’s punk rock Nancy Drew story, “Teenage Wasteland” are both dark comedic tales centering on the Fresh Kills dump—the only Staten Island landmark that I remember after reading through the book. Which leads me to a criticism...

The anthology’s only real failing is that it left me with little impression of what Staten Island is like. In other words, many of these stories could have taken place in the San Fernando Valley and, other than more time spent in cars, little would have changed. Perhaps the themes the collection does evoke—marginality, isolation, desperation—are not specific to Staten Island per se but rather shared by suburbs and outskirts throughout the country.

Or maybe it’s because I know nothing about Staten Island.

One final quibble—and it’s not altogether insignificant, though it may be a touch petty. I don’t understand why Eddie Joyce’s “Before it Hardens” was included in this volume. While it isn’t a bad story—and I actually identified with the summertime travails of our teenage protagonist—there’s no crime. I kept waiting for someone to get killed. When no one did, I was sorely disappointed.

Let us not end with a complaint. Instead, we’ll praise Staten Island Noir for its diversity. The stories in this collection are told from a broad range of perspectives, in terms of race and of gender in particular. Noir is too often a white man’s world.

The Math

Objective Score: 7/10

Penalties: -1 for the non-crime entry; -1 because I don't think I learned anything about Staten Island

Bonuses: +1 for diversity

Nerd coefficient: 6/10

Microreview [book]: A Death in Mexico

A Death in Mexico by Jonathan Woods [New Pulp Press, 2012]

The Meat

The pulp and noir revival has, in my opinion, produced uneven results--a few gems, but a lot more books that seem fixated on the more lurid aspects of the genre. The first two scenes of A Death in Mexico concerned me--a gruesome murder of a pretty young woman, an act of domestic violence that seemed gratuitous and superfluous to the plot, and an interaction between the couple that found the body with a stereotype of the fat, lazy and corrupt Mexican cop. Now, all these things do appear in real life: some murders are gruesome, some men do hit their wives/fiances/girlfriends and many cops, in Mexico as elsewhere, do accept bribes. But their rapid fire delivery made me wonder if this was going to be the kind of misogynistic "thirdworldsploitation" vehicle I generally try to avoid.

Thankfully that's not the case at all, and I suspect Woods uses this setup as a red herring. To begin, the protagonist, Inspector Hector Diaz, is a virtual inverse of the corrupt third world cop stereotype: he's thin, he's honest, he doesn't take bribes and he won't "play the game." He just wants to find out who killed Amanda Smallwood, a gringo sexpot who modeled at the local art school and, as it turns out, didn't actually sleep with the (many) men who wanted her. To find the killer, he has to delve into San Miguel's expat-dominated art scene, its imbroglios and petty jealousies, while navigating unreliable subordinates, a hostile mayor and various shady characters along the way.

We are led to think the victim's murder is a sex crime, but then we're given ample reason to doubt that. Smallwood isn't at all a "tramp" or "tart," words used by peripheral male characters to describe her. And generally speaking, the women who populate A Death in Mexico are anything but the helpless or too-far-gone types that proliferate in classic noir. Instead, Woods introduces us to a series of strong, capable, sexually liberated and independent figures. The sexism of 1930s-50s America and France, where most classic noir was written, can be understood as an historical construct of that time period, but reproducing it in something written today (about today) is problematic, no matter how much you love Dashiell Hammett or Jim Thompson. Woods consciously subverts these anachronisms, which works as a playful critique of the classics, but also populates his San Miguel with much more interesting characters than if it stayed faithful to the genre's source material.

Woods' portrayal of the parallel universe of San Miguel's expat colony is another strength of the novel. In contrast to romantic depictions of self-actualizing Westerners among "poor but soulful" natives (think Eat, Pray, Love), the expatriates in A Death in Mexico are presented as they are in real life: frequently insular, generally privileged and often disdainful of locals. Woods, an American who spends a lot of time in Mexico, clearly knows this kind of social environment and its "types" well: the drifters, the moochers, the sexual predators, the barflys, the wannabe big shots, the failures at home looking for a second chance, the retirees, the absent diplomats, their bored wives and husbands, etc. It's not a pretty picture, but isn't too grim or essentialist either--there are a few expatriates in the book who may be privileged but aren't insular or disdainful, and whom Diaz grows to view sympathetically.

This glimpse into Mexican perspectives on the gringo expatriates is, in many ways, more interesting than the expatriates themselves. In normal times, these range from bare toleration to a view of the expatriate as a sort of amusing/bemusing curiosity, but they quickly scales down to annoyance and resentment when something goes wrong and the senses of entitlement and superiority that many expatriates assume in their dealings with locals comes to the fore. You ocassionally sense these kinds of perspectives as backdrop to Western novels with "heroic expatriate" protagonists, and they are certainly recurrent in the writings of non-Westerners, but it's rare for Western novelists to confront these ugly truths as clearly, as deftly and as reflexively as Woods does. Though I don't have any special knowledge of Mexico or its expatriate colonies, this treatment felt like an accurate representation of local/expat interactions in places I do know well. (There's also a clear, though not heavy-handed, parallel to how the urban, educated Mexicanos barely notice the brightly-clothed, rural and uneducated Indios who come to San Miguel to sell crafts and agricultural goods. Again, I can't vouch for the realism of this in the specific context of small-city Mexico, but I recognize it from elsewhere.)

So yeah...A Death in Mexico is a clever and thought-provoking novel. But is it a good crime novel? Some readers might be turned off by its languid pace, though this didn't bother me--I devoured the book in three days, not missing the frenetic action that ones finds in a typical mass market thriller. But I did take issue with the ending, which just sort of happened. I'm not asking for an unrealistic tying up of loose ends, but the resolution to the mystery felt tacked on and unrelated to the bulk of the investigation. I'm sure that happens in real life, but I would have liked a little more lead-in.

All in all, though, A Death in Mexico is a well constructed, compelling, character-based mystery that should appeal to readers who want their neo-noir smart and current. Recommended.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for bringing noir gender relations into the 21st century; +1 for not depicting Mexico as either a hotbed of unending corruption and drug murder or as a colorful backdrop to the adventures of expatriate heroes.

Penalties: -1 for the unsatisfying ending.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10. "Well worth your time and attention."

Read about our non-inflated scoring system here.