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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Autumnal" data-source="post: 9662450" data-attributes="member: 6671663">Blood Standard, Black Mountain, Wirse Angels, and The Wind Began To Howl, by Laird Barron. Three novels and a novella, all featuring the same main character. We meet Isaiah Coleridge, who narrates all of these, in Alaska. He says, “Those movies by Albert Broccoli about the world-famous spy? In every flick there’s a sinister, powerfully built dude in a nice suit lurking at the margins. He kills people who annoy his boss, the archvillian. I was that dude.” He’s the Mafia’s best hit man in the frozen north. Until he screws everything up. For all his badness, and he’s not kidding himself or is about that, he does have limits. Cruelty to animals is one of them. So when it comes to his current boss or the targets of a poaching party, it’s no choice at all for him, and shortly he’s about die for nearly killing the boss. Complicated circumstances lead to his being relocated to upstate New York instead. Gradually he makes a place for himself, adjusts to life outside the Mafia, falls in love, rescues a dog, learns to be a private investigator, deals with local crimes, their committers, and connections to larger matters. One of the really neat things here is their genre shifts. The first book is straight-up modern-day noir. The second combines noir and horror, bringing Isaiah and his world of crime up against the edges of horror elements Barron has built up in the past - searches for transhuman experience gone terribly wrong, very rich and powerful families and government groups trying to weaponize ancient occult secrets, things that are very much less human than they seem. Third third book and novella follow up on that to make life much weirder for Isaiah and those around them. Barron excels at writing about the awfulness of living somewhere the normal bounds of reality are falling over. And his deep dive into Isaiah is his best character building yet. Isaiah isn’t out to become a good guy. He’s honest with himself, including about his propensity for violence and ways his work is satisfying to him. But there things he wants to change without dooming himself to frustration and relapse. Hugely satisfying. Highly recommend to people who like noir with their horror, and vice versa.</blockquote>

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