Adam Sternbergh

Spademan is back for another adventure with his bleak outlook and black humor.
I love the character of Spademan, really enjoy his voice, and this time his clipped sentences and viewpoint seems to lengthen that little bit -- maybe it's the kid and her kid that he rescued from the last book that have mellowed him a little bit.
But while he's more mellow it doesn't mean that he's any less cynical. When he arrives home to find a sort of competitor (since he, himself, is a hitman, a garbageman, as show more he coins it) nailed to his door "like a cheerful Christmas wreath" he takes it all in stride, his house crowded, not with carnage, but an almost domestic scene.
The book goes quick and you get the feeling that Adam Sternbergh had a great time writing it (I got a kick out of his use of Check-Off's rental van towards the end, could imagine himself chuckling as he wrote that scene), which makes it a super enjoyable read. show less

WESTERN SUSPENSE
Adam Sternbergh
The Blinds: A Novel
Ecco
Hardcover, 978-0-0626-6134-0, (also available as an e-book, an audio book, and on audio CD), 400 pgs., $26.99
August 1, 2017

1. NO VISITORS
2. NO CONTACT
3. NO RETURN

Those are the rules in Caesura (rhymes with “Tempura”), Texas (aka The Blinds), population forty-eight, located somewhere outside Amarillo, enclosed by a fourteen-foot fence. A twist on the United States Federal Witness Protection Program (WITSEC), the population of show more Caesura are criminals (some are a “coiled trap,” others are “more like a malfunctioning valve, a faulty weld, a crack in a storage tank leaking toxins”). But they don’t know that. A shadowy organization called the Fell Institute has perfected a method to wipe our memories, and made a deal with the U.S. Marshals to conduct a cruel neurological and psychological experiment. All has been peaceful in Caesura for eight years, but now there are two bodies, both shot to death.

The Blinds: A Novel is the latest from Edgar-nominated author Adam Sternbergh. This novel is an original fusion of mystery, comedy, procedural, suspense, and western, seasoned with a bit of science fiction — The Sopranos meets The Andy Griffith Show meets The Twilight Zone.

Sternbergh has a lot of fun naming his characters: Each new citizen of Caesura is required to choose a new name using two lists; one list is the names of movie stars, the other is names of United States vice presidents. The result is characters named Spiro Mitchum and Doris Agnew, which had me giggling regularly.

These characters are numerous and diverse, but because of the lack of backstories due to the memory wipes, they can’t be complex, making identifying with them and caring about them challenging. There are a few exceptions. Sheriff Calvin Cooper, our anti-hero who’s never had to load his sidearm until now, is given to rambling interior monologues. Sidney Dawes is Cooper’s new deputy. She’s officious, ambitious, and insubordinate. Fran Adams, former love interest of Cooper, is the only resident with a child, eight-year-old Isaac, born in Caesura. Fran’s only memento of her previous life, other than Isaac, is a tattoo of a series of numbers encircling her wrist.

The Blinds takes place over five days, but Sternbergh takes too long building to the action, and when the action begins the unrelenting violence becomes tedious. But the plot is intricate and creative, the foreshadowing is hair-raising, the twists whiplash-inducing. And you have to appreciate a plot that employs Susan Sontag essays as a major clue.

Sternbergh can turn a phrase. During a town meeting, the “crowd pulsates in the heat, murmuring, fluid and combustible.” In the bar, “a defeated ceiling fan begins its exhausted rotation.” When the climactic action begins, “The silences after the shots are the worst part. Then more shots, sharp reports, getting closer,” a resident thinks, “Like the knock of a census-taker, stopping at every door on the block, approaching yours.” Channeling Davy Crockett, Cooper says, “Let me stress that, despite the perimeter fence and the various rules, your residency here is not a punishment. You are not in jail. You are not in hell. You are in Texas.”

The Blinds is about community, retribution (“a distant relative of justice”), the possibility of redemption, and the role memory plays in identity. There’s more than meets the eye to The Blinds.

Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life. show less

This month's Post-Apocalyptic Book Club selection!

In a dilapidated New York City reeling and in decline after a dirty bomb attack on Times Square, we meet Spademan, who describes himself as a 'Garbage Man.' In fact, he was indeed once employed collecting trash. But now? He's a hit man. Times have changed.

The novel has a double-pronged structure - it does a great job of gradually revealing both the history of what happened to New York and what happened to Spademan himself, and simultaneously show more setting up a noir thriller plot.

Spademan is hired to kill a young woman - but what he discovers about her leads him to renege on his contract - and to find himself in an increasingly-deep pile of crap, as he ends up investigating the suspicious promises of an evangelical cult that promises a virtual-reality Heaven - but, of course, hides something much nastier behind the sparkling golden sales pitch.

Hard-boiled mystery, cyberpunk, and dystopian genre tropes gleefully rub up against each other in a quick-moving, highly entertaining story. show less

Spademan (not his real name) used to be a garbage man. That was back before New York City was devastated by a dirty bomb and abandoned by half its population, while most of the other half retreated from reality into VR dreams. These days, he's a hit man. Usually he doesn't ask questions and doesn't hesitate, but when he's hired to kill a young woman, he finds a reason not to follow through and instead ends up taking her side against her father, who turns out to be up to some ugly, ugly show more stuff.

I could quibble with a few aspects of the plot, and I suspect it may be entirely too dark for a lot of people, but overall, I really liked it. Spademan's a very well-drawn character, dangerous and damaged, whose personality comes through strongly and immediately. The writing style consists of lots of terse little sentences, often no more than one to a paragraph, almost like a parody of a hardboiled noir story. This looks like it should be annoying, or at least get annoying very quickly, but instead it works surprisingly smoothly and effectively. The setting and the premise reminded me a lot of The Dewey Decimal System by Nathan Larson, but I enjoyed this one much better. I'll definitely be checking out the next book in the series.

As a bonus, the volume I have also includes a short essay about anti-heroes by Sternbergh, and a thought-provoking, delightfully nerdy conversation about genre and the blending of genre boundaries between Sternbergh and Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians and sequels, which was well worth reading all by itself. show less