Bleed
"Bleed" is the sequel to "Horn", known locally as Peter's unicorn porn book. Yes, you read that right. Although it's fantasy, it's not the fantasy of Lord Dunsany or J.R.R. Tolkien, it's more like the fantasy of Dashiell Hammett or James Hadley Chase. Not known fantasy authors. "Horn" introduced the detective Miriam Aster, a hard-boiled gumshoe who's been dragged into a world she'd rather not know about, and has regretted it ever since. She's bitter and has a bad attitude and isn't happy that these things keep happening to her. She's a great character. As this is not a review of "Horn", I'll just tell you my 14 year old's summary of it: "it's messed up". Warning: these books contain adult concepts and high level coarse language and high level coarse faeries.
"Bleed" is the second story of this reluctant heroine, in which once again her past comes back to haunt her. Aster has had dealings with the land of faerie, and has learned that as much as humans can be sordid and exploitative, creatures with magical powers can be even more so. May Gibbs would be shocked. Few people other than Aster understand how the world of faerie interacts with ours, and even fewer want to know, so when there's trouble she has a hard time avoiding it.
Another fun part of the book is that the author lives in the same city as I do, and the story is consequently set in somewhat familiar locations. I had fun trying to imagine what part of town he might have been thinking of when he wrote a particular scene. I was also very impressed to see a jacaranda tree in the story - I don't recall ever having noticed a jacaranda mentioned in a novel before.
I'd love to tell you more about what happens, but I don't want to spoil a single thing. The author tends to write tersely, letting you read between the lines to understand the background, and figuring out what's going on and how the universe works is part of the fun. Most of the folklore about the world of faerie seems to be true, but the tales never seemed to mention the yukky bits... like the bit about the unicorn, for example. It seems to me that writing in the hard-boiled style must be a difficult art - one false image or poorly chosen word can lighten the tone and detract from the story - but Peter seems to have it nailed, and it's a pleasure to read. Not pretty, but pleasurable.
I'm very impressed with this new genre of hard-boiled fantasy noir, of which "Horn" and "Bleed" are stunning exemplars. It revives the hard-boiled genre with a splash of fantasy to liven it up, whilst remaining dark in the hard-boiled tradition. The other story I've read in this genre is Tansy Rayner Roberts' "Siren Beat", also published by Twelfth Planet. I'm not so much of a fanboy as to be up-to-date on everything that's happening in Australian SF, but I feel that as a casual observer I'm seeing great things happening.
