Blackbirds

Chuck Wendig, 2012

(February 2013)

I wanted to like this. I needed to like this. After all the fractured narrative, unreliable narrator, non-linear, multiple viewpoint, worldbuilding nonsense I’ve gone through recently this promised to be a straightforward but fun urban-fantasy thriller, with a bit of edge and a strong and spunky heroine.

The spunk’s laid on pretty think though. There’s just too much to swallow, to be blunt. Too much spunk. Huge splashing gouts of the stuff jetting endlessly from the page into the reader’s face, caking it in a pungent, dripping crust and obscuring the view of pretty much everything else. We get it, Chuck, she’s got a mouth and an attitude and she’s sassy and spunky, no need to subject us to this circle-jerk of characterization bukkake.

It’s fast paced though, which is pretty much the only reason I finished it. I forgave the early torrents of spunk as just the over-eager excitement of a teenage prom-date, desperate to make a good impression but wholly unable to control his more hormonal responses. I assumed that once it had shot its first load in the opening fumbles on the couch it would settle down a bit and develop a more confident, leisurely touch and a less frantic rhythm.

Nope. But by the time I realized it wasn’t going to calm down any I was already 1/3^rd of the way through and figured I may as well keep on going. I’d come far enough that not achieving some sort of climax would have been disproportionately frustrating, even if I did have to provide most of my own stimulation; it didn’t even have the good grace to give me a reach-around whilst it kept up its jack-rabbit hammering. At least it was over with quickly.

I apologize for the puerile nature of this metaphor. It is a proper metaphor though, and the more frequent use of such would have been an improvement in Blackbirds, if only because it might have mitigated the rampant overuse of laboured similes. And by, ‘rampant overuse,’ I of course mean, ‘they’re used frequently and awkwardly enough that I noticed, and it became really distracting.’

It is also a damn sight more subtle than almost everything in the book. This is a very parochial, male, middle-American conception of ‘edgy’; the toy knife in my eldest son’s My First Kitchen™ playset is less blunt and projects a keener sense of danger. This is also a very parochial, male, middle-American conception of a ‘strong female protagonist’: basically an angry teenage boy with snappier one-liners and alternative plumbing. Oh, she can handle herself in a fight all right, she uses the word ‘cunt’ (once) and finds jokes about domestic violence and rape a turn-on, but she also caves in to the initial antagonist’s demands because – I am in no way misrepresenting this – he threatens to tell on her to her mother.

This is a boy’s book; it displays precisely the worldview and preoccupations of a middle-class adolescent white boy who’s spent too much time playing videogames and watching porn in his parents’ basement, and not nearly enough time outside interacting with real people. Swearing and violence and sex are cool, but only within a set of meekly defined, safely conventional limits. Girls are great in theory, but are a little scary in practice and are only to be trusted as long as they aren’t all girly and can act like one of the boys. Bad girls are really good at heart and secretly just want a nice guy to protect them. Parents are such a drag, life is so unfair, and drugs are bad, mmmkay?

I did, however, greatly enjoy page 241.

I’m not some misappropriation totalitarian who believes that authors should only ‘write what you know’, because the logical extreme of that position is the end of all fiction. Trying to explore beyond your comfort zone is worthwhile and to be encouraged and applauded. But this isn’t that. This reads very much like an author taking things he’s not so familiar with and forcing them to conform to patterns with which he is. An author who’s stuffing the square peg of the ‘edgy’ into the round hole of his comfort zone so that everything gets malformed and stretched* and that is, at best, unsightly, uncomfortable, and not a little messy. Sasha Grey and pals may all look like they love getting the money-shot in the kisser but that’s their job; in the real world you try blowing your wad in someone’s face on the first date and there’s unlikely to be a second. Probably an idea to double-bag as well, it’d be less embarrassing all round.

*I promise you that’s not a goatse link.