(This review was written before I launched the review site)
I just finished reading The Grand Dark, by Richard Kadrey.
A quick synopsis: The war has ended, but everyone knows that a new war is on the horizon, and is trying desperately to ignore that inevitable fact. In a city hell-bent on distracting itself by any means necessary, a bike courier tries to earn a little money, score some good drugs, and maybe afford a better place to live so he can impress his actress girlfriend and her bohemian high-society associates.
This is not a story about the high and mighty scheming to win or avert the coming war; we don’t even get a full explanation of the politics involved. It’s the story of one guy trying to survive in a world that is very quickly going mad.
What a great book.
First off, I should say that I’m a pretty big fan of Richard Kadrey’s other work. His Sandman Slim series is the best kind of pulp urban fantasy, all bloody knuckles and sarky one-liners and punk rock demons and people who seem like they’d be fun to hang out with making bad decisions. Good stuff. So based on that experience I came into The Grand Dark predisposed to like it. Take that into account when reading this review.
The Grand Dark is a book about a guy who gets promoted, and then everything goes to shit.
It’s also a book about a society that has just survived a truly devastating war, knows that it won’t survive the next one, and is partying itself into oblivion to try and forget that fact. They’re running out of resources, but they’re not going to blow through all the drugs and alcohol before the cannons start up again and everyone has to go back to being very serious about everything, so why worry about it? It’s a really good depiction of an attempt to cover up existential dread with excess and decadence, and the toll that takes on people–especially the ones who can’t afford to buy into all the hedonism going on.
It’s also a book about the lengths that those in power will go to if they think that they might lose that power. Those lengths are, as per usual, horrifying.
This book is filled with fantastic little details about the characters and setting that work together to build a convincing and realistic world to the point that I started feeling genuinely unnerved as stranger and stranger things started happening and the city inched ever closer towards insanity and war. The world is falling apart, and you know from the start that the everyday routines of our main characters are only being built up so that they can be torn down along with the rest of society, but as always, the devil’s in the details, and a lot of those details take some unexpected turns. I was able to call a couple of the major plot twists in the book, but not all of them, which I was very happy about. I always love being surprised by that sort of thing.
Some minor discordant notes, accompanied by some spoilers (seriously don’t read the next paragraph if you’re even thinking about reading the book):
The book does have one spot where the main character just kind of stumbles into exactly what he needs, meeting by complete coincidence some characters who can help him out in very specific ways, and who also have an urgent need for someone with his exact skill set (if you’ve read the book, it’s the point where he visits the fortune teller at the carnival). And there’s a bit of the cliche “lone man rescues his kidnapped girlfriend” plot, which is…well, it is what it is. It does help that (spoiler alert) every attempt by the main character to find and rescue his girlfriend by himself fails miserably, and it’s only when he starts working together with other people that things actually go smoothly. Which is a fun change of pace from the way these stories usually go.
Anything else I could say would be a really major spoiler. Go read the book and find out the details for yourself.
Everyone’s waiting for the next war to start, and it’s driven the city a little mad–get in there and see the sights while you still can, while you can still get your hands on wine and morphia. Try to get out before the mob burns down the theater and the plague bombs start falling.