Matt Wallace's THE FAILED CITIES

It can be easy to forget when reading this newly published hardcover collection of what once was a serialized podcast novel/anthology called "The Failed Cities Monologues" that it was originally penned in 2006 -- before the current financial crisis, before cities like Stockton and San Bernadino, CA and Detroit, MI went bankrupt. We were still riding relatively high, in 2006. Which is to say that Matt Wallace was maybe a little bit prescient.

The Failed Cities really concerns what was a single city bifurcated by a river -- which made it all the easier to let half of it go to crap when circumstances made its leadership give up on the poorer side of the river, withdrawing the police rather than utilities support after a rigged vote and thus letting the cheap side fall into lawlessness, a shanty town with seven story apartment buildings. The rich side, meanwhile, has its own problems, hosting, for instance, a giant crap crater that was originally a building site for what was going to be the most luxurious arcology build in the history of ever, until the financing fell through. Oops.

Within this world, eight point of view characters are living their lives: a street preacher (member of a sect of these, who have more or less taken on the role of the police in a wholly informal way), a pulp fiction writer (who makes ends meet by fighting in an arena and getting beaten to a pulp), a hot-rodder (who has a side business in acting as a one-man underground railroad for abused sex workers), a pair of brother and sister assassins (one of whom has had weird bone grafting surgery so all of her joints are essentially deadly edged weapons and the other of whom is Just. Huge.), a freelance moderator/negotiator (who got his start by talking his way out of a bar fight he kind of started), a Ukrainian immigrant escaping his family's legacy of heroism (who winds up backing into a heroic role as the Detective Who Will Catch The Serial Killer and immediately regretting it) and a black widow femme fatale (who sees through everyone else's schemes and plots to turn all those schemes on their heads). Each takes a turn at forwarding the overall narrative as their stories are intercut and overlap with one another to portray a world of lawlessness, struggle and occasional hope.

And yes, I'm going to mention the Godbody standard here, for The Failed Cities comes closest to meeting it of any book I've read, closer even than The Book of Skulls did. Which is to say that each character voice is distinct and believable, including those of the women, and I'm fairly certain a person familiar with the book could guess who was speaking from a randomly chosen passage read a loud, within a paragraph or two, if not a sentence or two. That takes talent.

So, top notch world building, top notch characterization, an interesting and intricate plot -- does this book have any flaws? Perhaps only the spidery typography, the font so thin it looks faint and was thus a little hard to read for these middle-aged eyes. But the contents thus displayed were so good -- and the hardcover containing them so gorgeous -- that I soldiered on with it. And hey, it's not like this was my first time visiting the Failed Cities; I listened to the podcast back in the day, which is why I knew I had to have this luxe edition. Go listen to the free original podcast version and see if it doesn't make you want one, too.

100 Books #100 - Ray Banks' WOLF TICKETS

So, it's official: I love Ray Banks.

From what I've learned of the backstory of the life of this novel, it's a bit of a wonder that I ever got to read it at all. And it would have been a crying shame of a brutal crime if I hadn't, because I do like a bit of crime fiction once in a while, and when I do, I like it to be spectacular.

Wolf Tickets is spectacular. Originally drafted as a collaboration between Ray Banks and Ken Bruen and featuring alternating chapters written from the point of view of two very bad friends*, the book is loaded with English and Irish lower class slang (one protagonist is one, and the other is, tadaa, the other) that, I guess, publishers thought would make it a too-difficult, too-challenging read for the average knuckle-dragging crime fiction fan? At any rate, it's only because Banks is stubborn and sure and teamed up with Blasted Heath Publishing to release it as an ebook.

HOORAY!

I'd caution my readers that this one isn't for everyone, though. The slang does take a bit of parsing, for one thing -- though really, context clues are a big help if the rest of the writing is good, and here, the rest of the writing is good, sometimes even brilliant. For another, well, duh, it's crime fiction. And these two, Sean and Jimmy, are serious freaking low-lifes on the trail of another pair who did Sean wrong: his ex-girlfriend, Nora, and her hitman ex-ex-boyfriend, who have stolen all of the hidden money (and his favorite leather jacket) out of Sean's home and are off to steal the rest - as in 200 grand he's stashed somewhere around Newcastle, UK. Or at least, that he's claimed to have stashed. Or has he?

So it's a race, it's a chase, it's a spree, full of hard drinking and drug use, vandalism, arson, assault, battery, foul language, more drinking, and a lot of brutal language**. These are not nice people, and of the characters there is not a one whom ordinary readers will find conventionally sympathetic. They made me wince a lot, look away a lot -- but never for too long, because they're too fascinating, the lot of them.

I just wouldn't want to meet anyone like them in person, thanks. I take those kinds of thrills vicariously. Which is why people like Banks and the Blasted Heath guys get my money.

Oh, and caveat lector: if you're an ex-smoker or someone who's trying to quit, this novel might be even rougher going for you than for the rest of us. They smoke a lot. Like, even when their mouths are so cut up they can barely talk lot.

*And here Banks has attempted a difficult feat: writing a novel in two first-person (and unreliable) voices. I don't see a lot of writers even trying this, but maybe I'm just not reading the right show-offs (it could easily blow up in one's face, after all). My standard for this trick is, of course, Theodore Sturgeon's Godbody, in which all of the different characters' voices are so well-defined one could tell who was speaking even if one didn't know where in the book a passage was found. Banks doesn't achieve quite that level of greatness, but he comes closer to it than most do, which makes this pulpy bit of brutal crime fun that much more enjoyable.

**Sample: "How about a drink and a sub?" "How about a f*** and an off" Funny, but not for everyone.