A gritty, weird crime novel of NYC
This was my first of Ellis’ novels, though I’ve some experience with his graphic novels, and narrator Cathey was also pretty much new to me, as while I’d seen him in supporting roles in a few films (Se7en, The Machinist) I haven’t yet tackled “The Wire” or “Oz”. I found his gravelly voice an absolutely perfect fit for the grit of this NYC-set novel of a spectacularly, spectacularly fucked-up serial killer and his “Gun Machine”. Like they do, an unconnected event which results in his partner’s death leads Detective John Tallow to discover an apartment whose walls are a tapestry of bizarre guns, set in whirling patterns. Each one — every single one — is linked to an unsolved murder. And the more Tallow digs, with the help of a motley pair of investigative and ballistics agents, the deeper — and higher — the trail leads. The description of the novel teases a bit about “deals with the devil” and “Manhattan’s old gods” but the novel’s text doesn’t straddle any such mimetic/fantastic lines. We are solidly in the underbelly of humanity, real enough to bite and not absurd enough to disbelieve. The only personal misstep for me — other mileages may vary — was the tone-deafness and repetition of a joke about being autistic; the overall “Machine” came into perfect lock and step for me. On a personal note: I think with this novel and audiobook, I began to discover a real shift in my reading, a willingness to chase story off the genre map for a while and see where it goes. Since, it’s led to some excellent places, and I certainly intend to keep up with the print/ebook publisher Mulholland Books’ line after a string of successes (The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes, Austin Grossman’s You, Joe Lansdale’s Edge of Dark Water last year) whether the books fall into the speculative fiction world (Beukes) or not (Grossman, and Lansdale, whose latest book The Thicket was published in September from Mulholland).