The Big Meat by Carlton Mellick III

(pb; 2017)

From the back cover

“The creature was finally dead. After months of fighting it, trying desperately to stop it as it rampaged across the American countryside, turning city after city into a landscape of rubble, we finally managed to beat the damned thing. We actually saved the human species. We survived.

“But the corpse still lingers.

“In the center of the city once known as Portland, Oregon, there lies a mountain of flesh. Hundreds of thousands of tons of rotting flesh. It has filled the city with disease and dead-lizard stench, contaminated the water supply with its greasy putrid fluids, clogged the air with toxic gases so thick that you can’t leave your house without the aid of a gas mask. And no one really knows quite what to do about it. A thousand-man demolition crew has been trying to clear it out one piece at a time, but after three months of work they’ve barely made a dent. And then there’s the junkies who have started burrowing into the monster’s guts, searching for a drug produced by its fire glands, setting back the excavation even longer.

“It seems like the corpse will never go away. And with the quarantine still in place, we’re not even allowed to leave. We’re stuck in this disgusting rotten hell forever.

“The Big Meat is a gut-wrenching, nerve-squirming survival story of loss, addiction and claustrophobia.”

 

Review

Meat, like Mellick’s other nailing-it works, deftly mixes genres, in this case: kaiju, drug addiction, plague and grief dramas as well as science fiction and icky horror. Less light-hearted than works like The Girl with the Barbed Wire Hair, Meat flirts with the saturnine-horrific tone of Village of the Mermaids and built-up dread of Quicksand House—it’s an inspired, entertaining 162-page novel, with its protagonist literally going through a “gut-wrenching” situation, looking for his disappeared Blue Food-addicted brother (David) while struggling to survive physically and economically in what appears to be a lose/suffer-more existence.

One of the many things I love about Mellick’s work is how he, with seeming ease, slips in backstory details without sacrificing its odd genre mix pacing, solid storytelling and relatable emotion impact.

Meat, less flashy in its setup and delivery than some high-profile Mellick's books, sports a profound maturity within its sometimes gory, genre-true (especially for kaiju fans) and inspired situations, a work worth owning—one of my favorite reads this year.

The Rubber Band by Rex Stout

 

(pb; 1937: third book in the forty-six-book Nero Wolfe detective series)

From the back cover

“What do a Wild West lynching and a respected English nobleman have in common? On the surface, absolutely nothing. But when a young man hires his services, it becomes Nero Wolfe’s job to look deeper and find the connection. A forty-year-old pact, a five-thousand-mile search and a million-dollar murder are all linked to an international scandal that could rebound on the great detective and his partner, Archie, with fatal abruptness.”

 

Review

Rubber Band has the erudite, stubborn Wolfe reluctantly harboring a pretty fugitive (Clara Fox) who’s suspected not only of monetary theft but murder—and those seeking her are not limited to wanting to arrest her. While the cops (often led by the sometimes-friendly Inspector Kramer) and dubious characters try to pound down Wolfe’s door, Archie Goodwin and Wolfe’s reliable butler Fritz Brenner actively form a further bulwark to the urgent invaders while Wolfe susses out the details of Fox’s three-prong difficulties, an effort that should earn him an impressive, calculated payday.

Rubber might be my favorite Wolfe novel thus far. It’s dead-on, from its characterizations, its editing and clever writing, and often laugh-out-loud smart dialogue. In some ways, Rubber feels like the crystallization of the first phase Stout’s iconic detective (considering there are forty-six Stout-penned Wolfe works), and it’s a great entry not only in Wolfe series but the mystery genre in general. Followed by The Red Box.

Goth by Otsuichi, aka Hirotaka Adachi

 

(pb; 2002, 2005. Translated from Japanese to English by Andrew Cunningham.)

From the back cover

“Morino is the strangest girl in school—how could she not be, given her obsession with brutal murders? And there are plenty of murders to grow obsessed with, as the town in which she lives is a magnet for serial killers. She and her schoolmate will go to any length to investigate the murders, even putting their own bodies on the line. And they don’t want to stop the killers—Morino and her friend simply want to understand them.”

 

Review

Goth is an excellent, unsettling, clever and twisty work, with a world not set in our reality and a plethora of amoral characters—not only the killers, who have a youkai-like air about them—drawn to the unsmiling Yoru Morino, who’s “Goth” in the sense of her melancholic air and primarily black colors, nothing more.

Animal lovers with little stomach for occasional, semi-detailed acts of animal cruelty (early to midway through Goth) might want to skip this tightly edited book—I considered putting down the book and reading something else, but pushed through the brief scenes/descriptions, and while I won’t read this book again (nor see its resulting Shonen manga and live-action film), I’m glad I read this, and might consider checking out other Otsuiki works in the future (provided there’s no more animal cruelty in them).

Suicide Hill by James Ellroy

 

(pb; 1986: third book in the Lloyd Hopkins/L.A. Noir trilogy)

From the back cover

“Detective Lloyd Hopkins is the most brilliant homicide detective in the Los Angeles Police Department and one its most troubled. In his obsessive mission to protect the innocent, there is no line he won’t cross. Estranged from his wife and daughters on the verge of being drummed out of the department for his transgressions, Hopkins is assigned to investigate a series a bloody bank robberies. As the violence escalates and the case becomes ever more vicious, Hopkins will be forced to cross the line once again to stop a maniac on a murder binge.”

 

Review

This edited review was originally published on this site on October 13, 2006. That review has since been deleted.

Suicide, likes its prequels Blood on the Moon and Because the Night, sports a nasty, tautly penned edge, but this time out, its character-based darkness is offset with an unexpected grace and sense of mercy, with an interweaving, often complex, plot focused and sharp book, with an underlying raw tone.

Lloyd Hopkins embodies this progression. While he’s still not exactly sensitive to others, he’s relatively more restrained, and—with exciting results—sometimes finds his roles switched with other characters (e.g., Capt. Fred Gaffaney, one of Hopkins’s chief foes), putting me in the transcendent mindset of the closing moments of another lots-of-edge work, Abel Ferrara’s 1992 crime drama-thriller Bad Lieutenant. Great capper to the Hopkins trilogy, this, worth owning.

Farscape: House of Cards by Keith R.A. DeCandido

 

(pb; 2000: television show tie-in. Events in this book take place “towards the end of the second season of Farscape, between the episodes “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “The Locket.”

 

From the back cover

“The pleasure planet Liantac was once the greatest gambling resort in the Uncharted Territories. Even now, having fallen on hard times, it remains a spectacle of glitz and greed. Astronaut John Crichton and his fellow interstellar fugitives see Liantac as the source of much-needed supplies—except for Rygel, whose boundless avarice is tempted by the promise of easy riches.

“To discharge the debt, and liberate their ship from the planetary authorities. Crichton, Aeryn, and the others must take on a number of challenging assignments. But all is not what it seems, for treachery and deadly intrigue hides within this. . . House of Cards.”

 

Review

House of Cards, an original-story novel inspired by the Rockne S. O’Bannon-created, Sci-Fi Channel show, reads like a genuine, unfilmed Farscape episode, with its character-true and sometimes flinty-humored dialogue and behavior, twisty and tight storyline, and possibly devious new characters who may or may not be using Moya and her crew for their own Liantac-centric ends. A fast-paced and hard-to-set-down book, it’s a worthy addition to the Farscape series, one worth owning.

House is followed by two character-/universe-linked sequels Dark Side of the Sun (by Andrew Dymond, published September 2001, said to be wildly inconsistent with the Farscape timeline) and Ship of Ghosts (by David Bischoff, published January 2002, which also has “better than Dark Side” but “bland” reviews on Amazon).