Salsa Nocturna

I picked up Daniel José Older's Salsa Nocturna pretty much the second I put down Half-Resurrection Blues, although I probably should have picked it up earlier, considering it was published a few years ago and I bought it in July. But I am a philistine and am terrible about actually reading short story collections, which is dumb, because I often enjoy them when I do pick them up.

One thing that is particularly fun in this short story collection is that they are all connected: They all take place in the same universe--indeed, the same Brooklyn--as Half-Resurrection Blues, and feature a lot of the same characters. A bunch of the stories are from Carlos' point of view; others are from the POV of other supernatural-affiliated characters, most of whom know Carlos and get all mixed up in his plans of trying to sabotage whatever nasty power-grubbing nonsense the Council of the Dead is up to.

While the Council gets up to quite a bit of nasty nonsense, including an attempted hostile takeover of a neighborhood in Manhattan that had been outside of its jurisdiction, not all the stories in the collection involve the CoD. Some involve various other malevolent ghosts, sorcery-wielding miscreants, and other weird shit. There's a great one about creepy possessed vintage porcelain dolls, although Carlos has to go and continually be such a dude and keeps referring to them as American Girl dolls even though they clearly can't be. There is also one about the ghost of a giant woolly mammoth, and that's possibly the least weird story in there.

There's a good balance of creepy and funny in this selection, with pretty much all of the stories being creepy and some of them being funnier than others depending on who's in them: Any time Carlos' ghost cop partner Riley shows up trying to be macho it's going to be goofy sort of funny; whereas CiCi's stories have a warmer, more subtle sort of humor, in an indulgent-grandma kind of way. (Like the old people IMing bit, which is... old people IMing. IT'S ADORABLE.) Carlos on the occasions when he's being a total dork continues to be the most fun, in my opinion.

Unrelated to the content, but a thing which I nevertheless have opinions about: This book is published by Crossed Genres, a funky small press here in MA, which is awesome. They also decided to use straight quotes instead of smart quotes for the whole book and really compressed ellipses, which is less awesome. I feel bad bagging on a small press for things like this but I really hate straight quotes in print.

ANYWAY. Do you like ghosts? This book has all the ghosts. Ghost elephants. Ghost bureaucrats. Ghost shit-stirring Black magicians from the 1800s (I think 1800s?). A ghost bus driver with a ghost bus. This book is only like 150 pages but it's got a whole shadow universe of New York in it full of weirdo ghosts doing weirdo ghost things, and it's great.

Originally posted at: http://bloodygranuaile.livejournal.com/60218.html