Daniel Polansky

This might be considered grimdark fantasy, for all the author seems to think that it is actually a "one-note joke". Hell, I have to disagree. I had as much fun reading this as I'd have when watching any of the old war movies with a small cadre of broken warriors gathering around for one last violent blow out, with all the natural elements of a heist novel, the underdogs (or rats) of a long and vast conflict.

It was pulled-off perfectly.

So what's the joke?

You know all those old YA novels that show more featured cute and furry mice going along on grand adventures in the wide world we know and love but unknowing to us? Yeah. That's this in a nutshell, only it's DARK and VIOLENT and would make a freaking fantastic and pretty darn EVIL trick to play on all those kids that would be screaming to watch this cute 3D film with cute kitties and owls and mice in a garden.

The story is fantastic and holds its own as easily as if it were in a dark fantasy or a modern and gritty Nazi-Occupied war film. It's only the reflection of exactly WHAT kind of setting it's in that makes this so damn funny. :)

Nominated for Hugo Novella '16 and I think I like this the best. :) show less

What a magnificently noir conclusion to this epic grimy twist of a trilogy. And I enjoyed every page of it. Sure, the flashbackstory asides were sometimes a little confusing and Warden continues to be such an arch-masculine loner noir hero that it makes one's teeth hurt from the stoic squaring of jaw, but this is just so deeply dedicated to the post-Industrial-collapse damage to humanity that somehow I don't just go with it, I revel in it. It's like a fantasy version of The Wire, with all show more the devil-may-care wicked enjoyment and serious business of soul-crushing, but just enough divorced from reality that it doesn't suck my spirits.

Also, fuck yeah Mazzie. show less

I want to start by saying that I much prefer the UK title of this book. ‘The Straight Razor Cure’ does a far more effective job of describing what kind of place Low Town is and how people there deal with problems. I know, “a rose by any other name…” and all that rot but still, one does like to get a sense of what one’s getting into.

‘Low Town’ is noir fantasy, somewhat reminiscent of Alex Bledsoe’s Eddie LaCrosse series. But while Bledsoe’s books are unabashed mash-ups show more told with tongue-in-cheek irreverence, Daniel Polansky’s noir fantasy is the real deal, delivered coldly and in deadly earnest.

By definition, noir fiction must feature a tortured protagonist and ‘Low Town’ provides that in spades. Polansky’s protagonist, the Warden (no other name given) is a veteran of ‘The Great War’ and a disgraced Black House (secret police) agent, eking out a living selling (and using) drugs in a miserable sinkhole of a city. His role as drug lord (with a very small ‘l’) affords him a slight degree of status among the people in his district which sometimes finds him serving as an uncomfortable liaison between his former employers in the police and the citizenry who wouldn’t be caught dead talking to the authorities.

The most striking feature of ‘Low Town’ is Polansky’s skill at turning a phrase. His gritty description of Low Town and its environs fits well with the noir genre yet is reminiscent of our own world as well. Less than a page in I was struck by the line “The dangerous men were still asleep, their blades sheathed next to their beds. The really dangerous men had been up for hours, and their quills and ledgers were getting hard use.” Yep, some things are true wherever you are.

Some readers have compared Polansky’s dark prose to that of Joe Abercrombie but I can’t confirm this as I haven’t read him yet. Both authors’ worlds seem pretty bleak and neither has much room for unicorns.

At times my impressions of ‘Low Town’ seem almost self-contradictory. Sometimes I feel like he has cheated by taking what is familiar and just changing the names. For example, with talk of opium and celestial kingdoms, Heretics really sound a lot like another name for Chinese. Similarly, The Great War sounds awfully similar to our World War One if you replace guns with edged weapons and gas with magic. At other times, though, Polansky’s tweaking of the familiar seems to be what makes his story fascinating. It’s like he is describing our world slightly out of phase, a world that we could see if we just had the right lens through which to view it.

While the characters are about what one would expect I’m not sure how you could write a noir novel any differently. A protagonist in noir has about as much chance of being in touch with his inner child as Hugh Grant has of getting cast in the next Hike Hammer picture.

‘Low Town’ is the debut novel by Daniel Polansky and is, for now at least, a stand-alone novel. It has the potential to be a great first volume of a series and I would definitely be interested in reading any subsequent volumes. It has been a while since I have paid any serious attention to fantasy and, it this is what is currently available in the genre, it definitely hasn’t gone downhill in my absence.

This is not a book that I would read to my daughters. It is violent and its protagonist is an unapologetic drug abuser. Also, while the author doesn’t go out of his way to impress the reader with his knowledge of four-letter words, neither does he shy away from using the harshest expletives when they are called for.

In the end, I’m going to give Low Town 4 points: 5 points for the writing, 4 for plot and originality and 3 for the characters. I definitely intend to keep my eye on this author and likely will get any future books he puts out.

*Quotations are cited from an advanced reading copy and may not be the same as appears in the final published edition. The review copy of this book was obtained from the publisher via the Amazon Vine Program. show less

This. This book, this author. Glad I had the pleasure to discover him.

"Not for the first time I wished I was as tough as I talked."

This is my brand of badassitude. It's rare that after the first book an author catapults to my favorites and then, after I purchase everything he has written, outside my genre or not, goes and doubles down on my expectations. His style captivates. The MC has a heart, even if one might not call it soft, if it can be found amid the sludge. Daniel Polansky cements show more himself as one of my go-to authors. And I will be going to.

March 2023: March's End - new book forthcoming. show less