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kestrell_The City & The City_ by China Mieville (Del Rey, 2009)
_The Little Sleep: A Novel_ by Paul Tremblay (Holt Paperbacks, 2009)-
These two novels, along with _The Manual of Detection_ by Jedediah Berry, are three of the most notable offspring of a new subgenre, noird or weird-boiled noir, which is what you get when you cross speculative fiction with noir. I say "new subgenre" but, as China Mieville blogged about it last summer, I'm probably just betraying the fact that I am hopelessly unhip. Still, if you want to see the baby pictures I recommend Tremblay's post about the term "weird-boiled" on The Little Sleep blog http://thelittlesleep.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/weirdboiled-or-noird/ or you can read China Meiville's more ephemeral discription here http://www.omnivoracious.com/2009/06/neither-a-contract-nor-a-promise-five-movements-to-watch-out-for.html and Jeff Vander Meer's discussion of the term re Jedediah Berry’s _The Manual of Detection_ here http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2009/01/23/something-strange-stirring-in-the-noir-jedediah- berrys-the-manual-of-detection/
To a large degree, however, the sometimes self-conscious litcrit is superfluous: this noir does what it has always done, namely, to use the recognizably gothic decay of urban landscapes and architecture to cast a flickering light on the interior landscape of the modern psyche, complete with its own particular non-supernatural incarnations of ghosts, ghouls, and vampires.
After all, a modern city is just as capable of hiding old secrets or a meglomaniacal madman as any medieval castle. Probably even better, because there are more forgotten spaces in which to hide and more strangers to suspect. As with the best gothics, the exterior confusion and corruption merely hints at the interior darkness.
The epigram used by Tremblay explicitly provides the map for this urban gothic landscape:
block quote start
I was more intrigued by a situation where the mystery is solved by the exposition and understanding of a single character, always well in advance, rather than by the slow and sometimes longwinded concatenation of circumstances. —Raymond Chandler
block quote end
Mieville's _The City and the City_ features a police detective who is investigating the murder of an unidentified young woman. In his attempt to discover who she is and where she came from, however, he uncovers a hornet's nest which threatens to destroy his career and his life as he discovers that the young woman resided in a foreign city, a city which shares the physical space but not the cultural space of the city he himself lives in. _The City and the City_ was a fascinating read, but at times I felt it was more of an intellectual exercise than anything else. The main character, although painted into a corner, never displays the kind of rich interior life of a Philip Marlowe, the three-dimensionality that can break your heart.
By contrast, I found Paul Tremblay's _The Little Sleep_ rife with emotional depth and even poetry.
Mark Genevich is a narcoleptic PI from South Boston whose physical as well as psychological sense of self was shattered years before by an accident which has left him uncertain as to which parts of his life are real and which are dreams. His professional and personal life are as broken as his sense of time, but when a woman shows up in his office to ask his help, he risks everything in order to prove that he's still capable of saving someone, even if he's lost faith in his ability to save himself.
I found _The Little Sleep_ to be impossible to put down, with Tremblay's prose proving to be just as riveting as the action, and for that reason _The Little Sleep_ did an outstanding job of echoing Chandler's own prose (if you've never read _The Long Goodbye_, you're cheating yourself; at the very least, go read the short story "Red Wind" to find out why interior life was as important, or more so, than action in Chandler's fiction).
(Also, extra points for the fact that The song Drive" by the Boston band The Cars came on the radio while I was reading the harrowing driving scene.)
I intend on reading more of Tremblay's work, including the followup to _The Little Sleep_, _No Sleep Till Wonderland_ (2010), and _Phantom_, an upcoming horror anthology he edited.
_The Little Sleep: A Novel_ by Paul Tremblay (Holt Paperbacks, 2009)-
These two novels, along with _The Manual of Detection_ by Jedediah Berry, are three of the most notable offspring of a new subgenre, noird or weird-boiled noir, which is what you get when you cross speculative fiction with noir. I say "new subgenre" but, as China Mieville blogged about it last summer, I'm probably just betraying the fact that I am hopelessly unhip. Still, if you want to see the baby pictures I recommend Tremblay's post about the term "weird-boiled" on The Little Sleep blog http://thelittlesleep.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/weirdboiled-or-noird/ or you can read China Meiville's more ephemeral discription here http://www.omnivoracious.com/2009/06/neither-a-contract-nor-a-promise-five-movements-to-watch-out-for.html and Jeff Vander Meer's discussion of the term re Jedediah Berry’s _The Manual of Detection_ here http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2009/01/23/something-strange-stirring-in-the-noir-jedediah- berrys-the-manual-of-detection/
To a large degree, however, the sometimes self-conscious litcrit is superfluous: this noir does what it has always done, namely, to use the recognizably gothic decay of urban landscapes and architecture to cast a flickering light on the interior landscape of the modern psyche, complete with its own particular non-supernatural incarnations of ghosts, ghouls, and vampires.
After all, a modern city is just as capable of hiding old secrets or a meglomaniacal madman as any medieval castle. Probably even better, because there are more forgotten spaces in which to hide and more strangers to suspect. As with the best gothics, the exterior confusion and corruption merely hints at the interior darkness.
The epigram used by Tremblay explicitly provides the map for this urban gothic landscape:
block quote start
I was more intrigued by a situation where the mystery is solved by the exposition and understanding of a single character, always well in advance, rather than by the slow and sometimes longwinded concatenation of circumstances. —Raymond Chandler
block quote end
Mieville's _The City and the City_ features a police detective who is investigating the murder of an unidentified young woman. In his attempt to discover who she is and where she came from, however, he uncovers a hornet's nest which threatens to destroy his career and his life as he discovers that the young woman resided in a foreign city, a city which shares the physical space but not the cultural space of the city he himself lives in. _The City and the City_ was a fascinating read, but at times I felt it was more of an intellectual exercise than anything else. The main character, although painted into a corner, never displays the kind of rich interior life of a Philip Marlowe, the three-dimensionality that can break your heart.
By contrast, I found Paul Tremblay's _The Little Sleep_ rife with emotional depth and even poetry.
Mark Genevich is a narcoleptic PI from South Boston whose physical as well as psychological sense of self was shattered years before by an accident which has left him uncertain as to which parts of his life are real and which are dreams. His professional and personal life are as broken as his sense of time, but when a woman shows up in his office to ask his help, he risks everything in order to prove that he's still capable of saving someone, even if he's lost faith in his ability to save himself.
I found _The Little Sleep_ to be impossible to put down, with Tremblay's prose proving to be just as riveting as the action, and for that reason _The Little Sleep_ did an outstanding job of echoing Chandler's own prose (if you've never read _The Long Goodbye_, you're cheating yourself; at the very least, go read the short story "Red Wind" to find out why interior life was as important, or more so, than action in Chandler's fiction).
(Also, extra points for the fact that The song Drive" by the Boston band The Cars came on the radio while I was reading the harrowing driving scene.)
I intend on reading more of Tremblay's work, including the followup to _The Little Sleep_, _No Sleep Till Wonderland_ (2010), and _Phantom_, an upcoming horror anthology he edited.
