Upgunned by David J. Schow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This one is so much out of the Warren Ellis playbook that I'm surprised it doesn't have a blurb from him
on the cover. It is a straightforward thriller, peppered with [highly implausible] anecdotes about a host of the messed up things humanity
has to offer. Tell me that doesn't sound like Crooked Little Vein.
Fortunatly, I liked Crooked Little Vein quite a lot, and I liked this one too.
It starts as a straightforward, if hard-edged, thriller: a cynical photographer, narrating in the first person
is kidnapped by a psychopath and made to take some blackmail photographs.
But the reader is surprised (at least I was) when in the second chapter the point of view flips and we get the
story from the psychopath's point of view.
Chambers, the aforementioned psychopath, has a great voice and is a very interesting character.
Unfortunately, he's also so unredeemably nasty that there's no real way to root for him. The thing that
would have elevated this novel from pretty good to amazing would have been a story line that offered the reader a
real choice.
There are a miriad of other flaws: the denoument is weak. The main character is really tremendously ineffective.
But overall this is a fun ultraviolent romp through hollywood's seamy underbelly. I will be checking out the author's other work.*
* Which, incidentally includes the screenplay for the Crow, which I've seen, and leads to a creepy bit of in-world
verisimilitude when the weapons handler on a movie set discusses with great seriousness the changes in weapons safety following
brandon lee's death on the set of The Crow.
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