Half-Resurrection Blues

Well, I feel like I have a lot of things to say about Half-Resurrection Blues, but chances are good I'll forget to say some of them, or possibly I will not say them as fully as they are in my head. Sometimes you get a book where there's just a lot going on. (Sometimes this is because it's 1500 pages, but sometimes it's not.)

Starting with the basics: Half-Resurrection Blues is the first novel in the Bone Street Rumba "spectral noir" or "ghost noir" urban fantasy series by Daniel José Older, who I've seen on a bunch of panels at Readercon and Arisia, where he was always a kickass panelist. He has opinions on italicizing Spanish that I always think about whenever we have clients who are like "We're trying to target a Hispanic market, also, italicize any term in Spanish." He also answers all my bullshit tweets which is (a) good author marketing branding practice stuff and (b) a sign that his fanbase isn't big enough, so go buy his book. He was also nice enough to sign my copy at Arisia so nyah nyah.

We'll get to the ugly little fucker on the exercise bike in a bit.

So "ghost noir" turns out to be exactly what it says on the tin: It's noir, all lyric description of gritty city streets (in this case, Brooklyn) and characters smoking a lot and doing shots because they're in such a manly bad mood and thinking about sex and having tragic buried backstories and stuff. It's also got ghosts. Our gruff damaged protagonist is a "half-resurrected" (meaning he died but has mysteriously come mostway back to life, no one knows how) special agent for the Council of the Dead. His name is Carlos Delacruz and he figures he's Puerto Rican and he doesn't know anything of his former life. Mostly he skulks around keeping shit-stirring ghosts in line and drinking rum with some of his ghost agent bros and making fun of hipsters in his inner monologue and reading, which sounds like a pretty good life for a noir protagonist. But then the plot shows up in the form of another half-resurrected guy--the first one Carlos has ever seen--who wants to bring a bunch of college bros into the Underworld, and Carlos has to kill him, and then everything gets complicated. Not least because Carlos immediately develops a ginormous crush on a photograph of the now-dead half-resurrected guy's sister, except that he's just killed her brother, so you can imagine how well that's going to go.

The other immediate problem is the sudden infestation of a bunch of soul-tearingly irritating (literally) ugly little demon things called ngks, which apparently look like tiny grinning toads riding tiny stationary bikes. Somehow they are connected to whatever terrible plan involved the college bros, and Carlos and his ghost cop buddies have to set about trying to figure out and dismantle an increasingly labyrinthine situation set up by some ancient weirdo called Sarco that manages to involve (and by involve I mean screw over) pretty much everyone we're introduced to in the entire book, as is right and proper noir/hardboiled plotting. I don't want to talk more about the plot because spoilers.

Possibly my favorite thing about this book is the voice. It's a first-person POV, as is also only right and proper, and man, does Carlos have certain aspects of sounding like Noir-y Protagonist Man down pat. He swears a lot and he bounces back and forth between the lyrical descriptive thing and the blunt, matter-of-fact hardboiled thing accompanied by cynical inner monologue about everybody. But while Carlos' voice and characterization is unapologetically working within a certain tradition, he doesn't sound like a Philip Marlowe ripoff. He's more modern and more Puerto Rican, obviously, and the Brooklyn he moves in is a modern Brooklyn, full of communities of color getting slowly edged out by annoying white hipsters and rich people, which is precisely what's happening in Brooklyn, from all reports. I'm wildly unqualified to have any opinions on the authenticity of the use of Spanish in this book because obviously the author is actually Hispanic and I am an Irish-American living in a mostly white section of Boston, but from some recent reports of People Having Opinions About Spanish In Fiction, I am going to say that it's really not that difficult to read, guys, even if you don't speak Spanish. I did not even have to use the Google machine once. Stylistically I think it lends a sense of place and a sense of specificity-- you don't feel like you're in Anycity USA, in the I Guess People Live Here Quarter where people speak Ninth Grade Textbook English--but whether it's accurate is up to people who have been to Brooklyn more than twice. The language overall is very playful and colloquial and makes you want to read it all out loud just for the fun of it.

Additionally, but no less importantly than any of the stuff to do with race, class, or identity, is that this book is funny. Dry cynical wisecracking is a time-honored part of noir, obviously, but the humor in this book runs much goofier than that sometimes, because why not. Carlos' super surly noir man persona not infrequently gives way to a sort of flaily haplessness when either shit gets truly bizarre (see: demons on tiny bikes) or when he's attempting to put together sentences about Sasha, our maybe-femme-fatale love-interest lady. There are also a handful of memorable puns, the aforementioned ridiculous ngk bikes (which are never really explained), and a ghost that shows up and says "Schmloooo" a lot during a very important and suspenseful following-people scene, apparently just to ruin the atmosphere. It could easily have not worked, but it does.

My biggest criticism of the book: It is pretty dudely. There are a handful of pretty cool but still pretty minor female characters, a secondary character who is a female house ghost, and Sasha. And I like Sasha, and I actually like most of the other female characters and think they all should totally get more page time in the sequel. Apparently the Council of the Dead and all its ghost cops have a serious gender imbalance in their line of work, though. Overall, though, considering the long history of surly-white-dude-ness and general misogyny in the noir genre, Half-Resurrection Blues makes an excellent refuge for people who love gritty noiry mystery shit but are over the surly-white-dude-ness and general misogyny.

Highly recommended for: Anyone who's ever read a Raymond Chandler novel and been like "This would be perfect with a little less raging racism and sexism, and maybe some ghosts." Fans of Castle who are always disappointed at the end of the Nerd Episodes when the vampires/zombies/ghosts/Victorian time travelers turn out not to be real. People who like urban fantasy but are bored of the same old Laurell K. Hamilton knockoff shit. Anyone who really appreciates good use of style and language in genre fiction.