On Goodreads, there is a reviewer named Kemper (an alias). He has since retired, which is a shame because I love his reviews. He enjoys a lot of the same crime fiction I do.
Anyway, Kemper had this tic I once found annoying in that he would write reviews by doing faux interviews with the authors of the books he read. He usually did this when he read something that wasn’t so good.
I preferred reading his regular reviews. However, as I’ve written so many myself now, I appreciate that one has to shake it up a little every now and then. And this book inspired me to do so. Without further adieu…
-Hey Jake.
-Hello, Pretend Me.
-Like gritty NYC crime novels?
-You bet I do.
-Like Charlie Huston?
-Read some of his books years ago. Loved em.
-Well guess what?
-What?
-Charlie Huston has a whole series of gritty NY crime thrillers.
-Awesome!
-And they’re set in the LES.
-Whohoo!
-Where the protagonist operates as a guy who does “favors for friends.”
-Can I get a Marc Albert YES!?
-There’s one catch.
-Okay.
-Just a small detail.
-Yeah.
-They’re vampire books.
-Oh.
-And while still gritty, they feature a lot of boring vampire stuff.
-Dangit!
-On top of that…
-It gets worse?
-…it has a plot in book two that addresses racism in this fantasy world…”
-Hey that’s not bad!
-…but Huston writes Black characters in the laziest, most stereotypical way possible.
-That is bad!
-So it’s kinda like a vampire…
-Stop.
-Half alive and half dead.
-Damn you.
-You’re still gonna read the rest of the series, aren’t you.
-Sigh. Yes.