RARA-AVIS: Terrill Lankford: Angry Moon

From: Joy Matkowski ( jmatkowski1@comcast.net)
Date: 30 Jan 2004


I carefully collected and pasted all your kind recommendations and then, for reasons way beyond my control, utterly lacked the time to read through them, make decisions, and shop.
    Instead, I tore through all the TBRs I could reach in search of a book that fit the January genre. I had Angry Moon available because Terrill Lankford is a listmate here or somewhere else, and I was pretty sure somebody here had mentioned the title. Besides, the cover has a giant Jules Verne-type pitted moon looming over a cityscape dripping molten lava; it looks like HB science fiction.
    Actually, having read it, I'd put it in the horror section, based on my minimal knowledge of either genre.
    In some ways, it's a hitman book, setting our protagonist hitman against his former trainee turned informant and then against his mentor hitman, turned worse. Our hitman is morally superior to other hitmen because he has standards: He won't kill or risk killing innocent bystanders as he assassinates his assigned targets. Then, having been smitten by a wooden female plot device, he develops even higher standards and decides to forgo his hitman career altogether, after he knits up a few loose ends.
    This book has lots of beyond-gratuitous violence, beyond slaughters of entire drug cartel armies, heads on stakes, and shop equipment grinding off the surface of our hero's forehead. In addition, our protag has pneumonia, described in ways that do not belong in books read for pleasure. All in all, though, it's a readable book, if you can get by the above, plus the overall plot that

SPOILER

the mentor hitman cannot be killed, even by a bomb that utterly destroys the car he's driving in, even by a direct headshot, even by--well, I forget what he tried next--because his severed spinal column, his crushed skull, and his dangling eyeball regenerate. He is a wolfman.

    I'll go back to the reading list at my leisure one of these days and find HBSF set in the near future in which our hero teleports or something. Next up for me in crime fiction is Stroby's The Barbed-Wire Kiss, which I acquired for a discussion on another list that has already finished discussing it and didn't much like it. But I love the title and have to try it.

Joy, suddenly having too much life and not enough time to read

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 30 Jan 2004 EST