Empire State - Adam Christopher

One of the most highly anticipated titles of early 2012, Adam Christopher's Empire State has been billed as superhero noir.  Angry Robot, recognizing the broad appeal of such a pastiche, has marketed the novel along with their WorldBuilder project.  WorldBuilder invites readers to create their own works based in the world of Empire State, which Angry Robot may publish (if they get anything good).  That's neither here nor there, but I thought it worth mentioning.  As a novel, Christopher's debut is wildly entertaining in a tradition Angry Robot fans have come to expect.

Set in New York City during prohibition, Empire State starts with a street tough named Rex witnessing the final battle of the superhero Skyguard and his nemesis the Science Pirate.  Make note of this, because it's the last real super-superhero action you're going to get (mostly).  The story quickly jumps out of New York and into the Empire State (don't worry, you'll be back) -- a parallel-universe, where prohibition continues unfettered and a never ending war with an unknown enemy keeps the populace in constant fear.

The narrative centers around a private dick named Rad Bradley, a divorcee who at 40 years old can only remember the last dozen years or so.  Beautiful women and newspaper reporters soon get him embroiled in a murder mystery that crosses space, time, and dimension.  Sound a little complicated? It is and it isn't.  At its core, Empire State is a standard mystery novel couched in the noir tradition. Rad is a straight forward down on his luck, hard-boiled P.I. working his way through a murder and the conspiracy behind it.

So, that's what the novel is about? Not really.  Near as I can tell, it's really about social inequality.   Existing as a poor copy of New York, down to the people themselves, the Empire State is an isolated and oppressed pocket of humanity.  At its edges, reality blurs, and across the Hudson River exists the Enemy, a nebulous entity of government machinated fear.  The conceit exists on two levels, both within Empire State and in New York.  Internally the authoritarian government rations its populace living large at the top, while those below struggle to subsist.  Externally, those without would sooner see it forgotten or destroyed all together because the implications of Empire State call into question self-realizing notions of identity and existence (draw what parallels you like from real life).

Alright, I might be pushing it a bit with that breakdown, but it's certainly there, whether the author intended it or not.  As for the prose and tone of the novel, Christopher does a bang-up job of conveying the State's bleakness.  The lament of lost memory and the hopelessness of constant war hangs over everything.  It's tangible and permeates all of his characters most especially Rad and heretofore unmentioned trapped explorer, Captain Carson.  Christopher channels a certain dark humor as well that kept me smirking in the face of the unrelenting gloom.

On the downside, the novel does struggle at times with clarity (here's where things get complicated), mostly in breaking down how and why Empire State exists.  Christopher would probably have benefited greatly from an astrophysics degree, and the whole setup reminded me not a little of Mark Hodder's Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack in that the novel itself isn't science fiction, but the device that makes it possible is.  How it all ties together with the plot makes for an obscure ending that doesn't jump the shark as much as it detours around it.  All that adds up to an ending that relegates Empire State to great noir instead of a great novel.

Utlimately, Christopher does a lot more right than he does wrong in his debut.   It seems that Lee Harris and the Angry Robot team have a clear editorial direction in publishing these pastiche novels that don't fit neatly into any sub-genre -- a trend that looks to continue well into 2012 with Empire State at the fore.  I don't put it in the same class as Lauren Beukes's Zoo City, but Adam Christopher is another great new voice in the genre.   It'll be interesting to see where he goes next.

Necropolis - Michael Dempsey

I'm starting to feel like a fan boy with all these Night Shade titles, although surprisingly this is only my fifth review from them this year (well under 10%!).  Of course, I'm already reading The Emperor's Knife by Mazarkis Williams (Night Shade/Jo Fletcher Books) not mentioning the huge stack of their back catalog next to my bed. This shouldn't be surprising. In 2010 Night Shade changed their mission statement to provide a space for new voices and authors in genre fiction.  Since then they've aggressively scheduled debut novels many of which are coming out this year.  It's become self evident that Ross Lockhart and his editorial team have the pulse of the genre community and continue to target novels that not only meet demand, but anticipate it.

In Necropolis, Michael Dempsey's debut novel, death is a thing of the past. NYPD detective Paul Donner and his wife Elise were killed in a hold-up gone wrong. Fifty years later, Donner is back, courtesy of the Shift - an unintended side-effect of a botched biological terrorist attack.  The Shift reawakens dead DNA and throws the life cycle into reverse.  Reborns like Donner are not only slowly youthing toward a new childhood, but have become New York's most hated minority.

With the city quarantined beneath a geodesic blister, government services are outsourced to a private security corporation named Surazal. Reborns and norms alike struggle in a counterclockwise world, where everybody gets younger.  Elvis performs every night at Radio City Music Hall, and nobody has any hope of ever seeing the outside world.  In this backwards-looking culture, Donner is haunted by revivers guilt, and becomes obsessed with finding out who killed him and his still-dead wife.

I was rather torn on Necropolis at first.  It reads like it was written by a screen writer, something I always struggle with.  That's not a criticism of the prose which is actually quite good, but rather an observation that nearly every scene in the novel is written with an eye for the visual medium.  Dark and stormy nights, lightning flash illuminations of the villain on the hill, fuzzy eyes awakening from a coma, are just a few of the techniques Dempsey employs that hearken to film.  In a written novel an author isn't limited to the visual to set mood and yet it felt like Necropolis frequently relied on these "establishing shots" to convey just that.

Cybill? Really?  I didn't see

that coming!

After writing that paragraph I decided to look up Dempsey's background.  His "About the Author" note at the end of the book mentioned his background in theatre.  That was significantly understating things.  In the 90s, Dempsey wrote for CBS’s Cybill -which won the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series in 1996 (bet you'd forgotten that!).  He has also sold and optioned screenplays and television scripts to companies like Tritone Productions and Carsey-Werner Productions in Los Angeles.  His plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and regionally in theaters such as Actors Theatre of Louisville.  He's also a past recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship for playwriting.

Given all that, it shouldn't be any surprise that his novel reflects his connection to visual mediums.  In fact, I applaud him for sticking with what he knows.  At the end of the day Necropolis is a science fiction novel deeply couched in noir and that's why Dempsey wrote the novel the way he did.  Noir is a visual classification that's grounded far more in film than in the written word. Smoky rooms, long legged dames, and that understated black-and-white visual style, are all components that distinguish noir.  Sure it's based on the hardboiled depression era detective novel, but what we call noir is fundamentally a visual effect.  I ended up asking myself, how can I be torn about something that worked so well?  Short answer, I can't - high five to Dempsey.

I don't stand in smoke for just any 

dame, see!

While the tone and mood of the novel worked wonderfully, I did find myself struggling a bit with Dempsey's choice of narration and points of view.  Donner's chapters are told from the 1st person while all the others are done from a 3rd person limited.  This was a technique also employed by Night Shade author Courtney Schafer in The Whitefire Crossing.  Unlike Schafer who limits her points of view to two characters, Dempsey spreads his around more liberally with a half a dozen or more leading to frequent shifts that don't always make a ton of sense.  Generally, when an author chooses to tell the story from someone's point of view he's telling the reader this is someone important.  There are at least three characters that receive this treatment in varying degrees who while interesting, in a I'd-like-to-read-a-short-story-about-this-person kind of way, provide nothing essential to moving things forward.

Relatively speaking that's a pretty small complaint.  The novel moves at a brisk pace and Donner is an interesting character with loads of demons to deal with - internal and external alike.  His partner, a smarty (think holographic AI) named Maggie, provides a great juxtaposition to the revived Donner.  As he struggles with why he's alive while Maggie is the epitome of life albeit in someone whose "life" is entirely artificial.  The plot itself is overtly melodramatic (again another theme of noir) leading to a pretty predictable ending and an eyebrow-cock-worthy coup de grâce.  In this case the journey is good enough to trump the destination allowing me to give Dempsey a pass for the lack of a cleverly disguised big twist.

Ultimately, Necropolis strikes just the right pastiche of genres and themes.  Demsey successfully takes components of film, science fiction, melodrama, and crime fiction and puts them together in what is another excellent debut from Night Shade.

Necropolis is due out in stores on October 4 and should not be confused with the similarly titled Nekropolis by Tim Waggoner from Angry Robot.