Shovel Ready

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 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 show more 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 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 show more 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

Pick your favorite descriptors: noir, dystopia, cyber, post-9/11, post-nuclear, sci-fi, lean, spare, gritty -- all apply to Sternbergh's series opener (supposedly soon to be a Denzel Washington franchise). Nothing really nice about this garbageman turned assassin (good jokes on how there's not much difference), but like Travis McGee, a way more southern Knight Errant, Spademan has his quirky ethics and won't kill just anyone.

But when a televangelist with ties to soma-like holograms for cash hires him, various realities collide and lots of people end up ickily dead. Gore aside, the writing is first-rate: say, if Adam Hall wrote a William Gibson novel with Chandler's characters & Lethem's NYC grit. Wow, wotta mash-up! {Review copy via show more nook download from Crown & Edelweiss. Thank you.} show less

Impressively imagined and rendered. In an all too believable future version of NYC, an assassin becomes entangled in the lives of an evangelist, who has a scheme to create heaven on earth, and his runaway daughter. The story is so compelling that it is only on reflection, after finishing it, that the plot weaknesses appear and you begin to ask questions about the ultimate motivations of the characters.

With all this apocalyptic reading I've been doing lately it's something of a surprise to me when I walk out the front door and find that the world isn't a barren, radioactive wasteland, or that the sky has been obscured by an object from the heavens, bent on our destruction.
"Shovel Ready" happens in a pretty near post-apocalyptic New York City and New Jersey (post-apocalyptic or not, who can tell, right?*). A couple bombs went off in the city, near Times Square, the whole thing is pretty near uninhabitable, unless you retreat into a bunker behind a wall of security or burrow down in the filth and depravity at street level and hope that it insulates you against the leftover radiation.
Sternbergh has fun with the premise and he's built a show more great character in Spademan -- an elusive hit man who tries to just treat it like a job. Like his old job, in fact, as he was a garbageman in pre-bomb times.
I loved the book, great writing, excellent, fun characters, engaging story that's funny in parts. At times the staccato dialogue, like you're being punched in the face by Spademan's succinct, brutish bon mots, is a bit much, but Sternbergh comes out of those dips roaring and ready to go again.

* Zing! show less

This gritty near future-noir thriller set in New York City after a dirty bomb exploded in Times Square thrilled me from the first page to the last, so much so that I immediately had to search the internet to see if there was a publication date for the next book. A former garbage man now hit man Spademan is my type of anti-hero protagonist – devastatingly ruthless yet ruled by his conscience. Fast-paced action, strong storytelling, a dollop of humor, and flawed compelling secondary characters rounded out this delectable read. Recommended for fans of urban noir who don’t mind a tinge of fantasy thrown in.

This review first appeared on my blog: http://www.knittingandsundries.com/2014/01/shovel-ready-by-adam-sternbergh.html

New York in the aftermath of a dirty bomb or two; residents traveling with portable Geiger counters to avoid the most radioactive parts of the city. Central Park is now a camp - a sort of modern Hooverville. Those with money who remain dwell almost exclusively in the limnosphere - a computer-generated reality they create for themselves. The rest take their reality as it comes, or pay for "hits" in generally dirty, one-off "dorms" where you pay by the hour.

Enter Spademan; a hitman who self-titles himself as a garbageman - he doesn't care why you want someone dead - he only wants to know who it is. His latest assignment is show more to kill a young woman who now calls herself Persephone - the daughter of a famous and powerful evangelist. What he quickly finds out is that Persephone is skilled in knifework, and killing her won't be as easy as it seems.

I absolutely loved this book. Quick bits of dialogue bring to mind a crime noire, interlaced with a biting humor as well as compassion. I quickly found myself immersed in Spademan's world. Great secondary characters, a pervasive theme, and an anti-hero that you find likeable in spite of yourself make this a fabulous must-read for almost any reader and already gave me my first five-star read of the year.

If that's not enough to convince you, take a look at some of the following quotes.

QUOTES (from an eGalley; may be different in final copy):

I had a wife.
Believe it or not.
And I was a garbageman too, if you're interested, a real one. The kind with garbage, like my dad. Left that too. Left most everything eventually.
Whatever hadn't already been taken away.
Now I kill people.
The end.
People get upset when you say you kill people.
Fair enough.
But wait.
What if I told you I only kill serial killers?
It's not true, but what if I told you that?
Now what if I told you I only kill child molesters? Or rapists? Or people who really deserve it?
Wavering yet?
Okay, now what if I told you I only kill people who talk loudly in movie theaters? Or block the escalator? Or cut you off in traffic?
Don't answer. Think it over.
Not so self-righteous now.
I'm just kidding.
There's no such thing as movie theaters anymore.

Cut a city in half and you're left with half a city.
But you definitely notice the ones who are gone just as much as the ones who stayed.

It's not the doing-it part that's hard. It's the justifying-it part. And I don't do that.
I'm not the decision. I'm just the action.
I'm just the bullet.
So I don't need to justify it. Or live with it.
That's your job.

I wonder if I'm expected to answer. I was always taught not to talk with my mouth full of teeth.

Writing: 5 out of 5 stars
Plot: 5 out of 5 stars
Characters: 5 out of 5 stars
Reading Immersion: 5 out 5 stars

BOOK RATING: 5 of 5 stars

Sensitive Reader: Occasional profanity, some violent (but not graphic) subject matter.

Book Club Recommendation: Yes; as long as members are comfortable with occasional profanity; I think that this book would initiate some interesting discussions on morality. show less