Blood, Sweat, and Semen: That's What Southern Boys Are Made Of

Bad City Blues
by Tim Willocks
p. 1991

Somewhere down south in a stale, sweaty bayou-adjacent Louisiana slum, a bunch of dudes engage in neo-noir charades and Tim Willocks wants us all along for the ride.

Bad City Blues is a story about some troubled men and dark family secrets and a suitcase full of stolen money and duplicitous women and any other things you’d expect from a noir-style story set in an unnamed southern city. It took a few chapters for me to get into because at first, all I could think was that this was essentially the equivalent of a romance novel, but for men. There is a lot of smut I wasn’t expecting, and it’s certainly not of the sensual, passionate variety typically found in romance novels, but rather angry, lustful sex full of self-loathing and confusion. In fact, every woman in the story has at least three sexual partners and you can bet that if one comes up in story, it will be only a paragraph or two before she’s sexualized.

The inherent misogyny in the fact that the only female characters in Bad City Blues are either sluts or prostitutes would unnerve me, but I had a really hard time taking Willocks seriously. The melodrama, the clichés, and the extreme alpha-ness of every male character in this novel were just too much for me. It felt more like overcompensation than anything. That doesn’t make the misogyny okay, it just set my brain straight to interpret this novel, which is nothing more than a blustery homage to noir fiction.

It can be fun, if you learn not to take it seriously. The characters are intense and their interaction is layered. I’ve never personally read an Elmore Leonard novel, but if his novels are anything like they are depicted in the series “Justified,” then I am wont to compare Willocks to Leonard, because reading this book felt a lot like watching an episode of “Justified,” from the antihero with a tortured past and a penchant for femme fatales, to the bumbling criminal lackeys, to the explosive and fatal finale when everything comes together.

Willocks may have a way with language and dialogue, and it was refreshing to read a story centered around characters rather than concepts, after reading so much pulp science fiction lately, but I won’t be delving into his limited repertoire any further. While I love the neo-noir genre, I can probably root out a few that don’t feel like I’m reading pornography for people who hate women.

Eight Against Who the Hell Cares

Eight Against Utopia
by Douglas R. Mason 
p. 1966

Douglas Mason’s Eight Against Utopia sounded like a really great concept for its time. Eight people, living in a domed city 7000 years in the future, realize their so-called Utopia is not all it seems and embark on an escape mission to the supposedly hostile outside world, not knowing what dangers await.

Will they all make it out? How will they pass the barriers? Will the traitor in their midst endanger their secret mission? And what dangers will they encounter outside the dome?

To answer those questions: Yes. Easily. No. And nothing.

Okay, so maybe it’s not that straightforward, but still, I was expecting a lot more from Mason’s book, based on the premise. What I got instead was a dry, monotonous, misogynist novella that is 90% action writing yet somehow, nothing really happens.

Having read more than a fair share of sixties and seventies science fiction, I know these stories tend to be more about the concept than about the characters. They were written in a time when possibilities seemed endless, and there wasn’t the pervasive sense that everything had been done before. The intelligent, masculine, alpha male hero was very much ‘in’ at the time, and women tended towards the passive, supportive, smart but weak types. These are things I’ve accepted about this niche genre, but they are not things I look for in a good story. Knowing what to expect and accepting it regardless are two entirely different things. Some times I am able to look past it because the concept is so well done, but this is not the case in Eight Against Utopia.

For starters, in a story where the basic plot is rebelling against Utopia, the Utopia you’re fleeing should be a character in and of itself. It was about halfway through this itty bitty book that I realized I’d completely forgotten what the domed city was even called. I had to flip back to the beginning where my eyes had glazed over at the routine descriptions and futuristic names thrown at us to remind myself that it was called Carthage. The only real hint we get that Carthage isn’t quite as ideal as it appears to be is that it directly monitors the thoughts of its citizens.

Okay. I mean, yeah, that totally sucks, but I’m gonna need more than that to go on. I mean, we didn’t even get to know what exactly Carthage does with its detractors, only vague implications that they are reprogrammed. If I’m going to invest myself in a story about fleeing a false Utopia, I want to know exactly why, dammit.

Thanks to the aforementioned thought monitoring, every single character is dull as a mayo sandwich on white bread. I thought this might go away when they finally escaped the city and their thoughts were free, but it didn’t. They were still all boring and indistinguishable, and none more so than the central hero, Gaul Kalmar, who spent half the novella being trailed by two women who—of course—ended up inexplicably competing for him.

What the story lacked in characterization, it should have made up for in concept execution and philosophy, but it utterly failed to deliver on these fronts as well. As I’d said before, 90% of the book is describing people’s actions escaping from the city, and no one really seems to talk about why they are doing it, or how they feel, or whether they regret it, or what they expected to find on the outside to aid in their survival. In 158 pages of novel, Mason spends more time talking about how comparatively attractive the women are than he does about why Gaul conceived of this mission of self-exile and how he convinced the others to come along.

Oh, and there are totally nine people who escape, not eight, so this was a stupid title as well. I hope it was the publisher’s idea to change the title from its original (From Carthage Then I Came) and not Mason’s, but I really don’t know. I wouldn’t really be surprised if Mason just rattled off the title as carelessly as he did the rest of this novel so he could move on to something better.