No Dogs in Philly by Andy Futuro

Philadelphia. Elzi on every corner, cops just itching to crack a skull, and the Gaespora lordin' it up in their high towers while the rest of the filth dribbled down the sewer. Saru had a way out. All she had to do was find the girl, one skinny stray with blue, blue eyes—bluer than anyone had ever seen—and ten million fat bucks were hers. Except someone was killing blue-eyed girls, and they were A-list, major-league, cold-sweat effective. And something about the end of all existence if she failed.

Don't let the doe-eyed woman on the cover fool you. That's Saru. She'll use that cattle prod on you if you mess with her. While not evident from the cover, she's enhanced with all the doodads that cyberpunk fans would expect of a near future sci-fi heroine. She's connected to the Net 24/7; has a pistol named "Betty" up her sleeve ready to go when adrenaline, pulse rate, and subconscious thought reach a critical threshold; and everything's subdermal. But just as her soft exterior belies the bad ass that she is, her gender hides the fact that she's more macho than most men, certainly the other male characters in the story. She could be Mike Hammer's granddaughter, though with less rage and more cynicism.

I get that she has to be tough. Her world is full of creeps and creepy things. But the hard-boiled persona has its limitations. While Hammer was out for justice, Saru only seems to be out for herself. People can sympathize with vigilantes, not so much the obnoxious brats just looking for a payday. It takes a lot of death before any kind of humanity breaks through the concrete barrier surrounding her heart. Even when it does, I wasn't convinced that she was going to carry through on her promise to set things right.

Futuro's Philadelphia is a complex place with enhanced humans, aliens, and monsters. The aliens and monsters would be right at home in Lovecraft's universe. But whereas Lovecraft's unthinkable creations lurked in the shadows and faraway places, Futuro's creations are out in the open. Considering the obvious menace that some of them pose, I'm surprised that there wasn't more panic among the populace. The elzi seem to be former people that were exposed to dark forces which devolved them into sub-human animals with tech sticking out of their bodies and great appetite (hence the book's title). Sure, there are even worse things lurking underground, but the elzi are out on Broad Street in broad daylight. The city seems to function; why not round them up or put them down?

Futuro is at his best when he taps into that Lovecraft vibe. He reaches out to the infinite and shows how it overwhelms a human mind. There's the plea from a desperate soul that we have to hope that the old, hungry god ignores our world. But it's the elements of indescribable horrors lurking in the dark that do unspeakable things that really fires things up. My favorite part was when Ria took shelter from the rain in a subway tunnel. It was already a tense scene as she sat with a few homeless people around a trash fire while dozens of satiated elzi slept nearby. Will they stay asleep? What if one of them needs a midnight snack? And then there's a rumble that wakes up the elzi, and they scatter. The people start to panic. What could drive an elzi to run away? Then Futuro reveals what that thing is.

Unfortunately, my experience was marred by comma problems (missing or too many) and run on sentences. Sometimes it seemed as if Futuro tried to cram as many adjectives and phrases as possible. These two sentences lack any form of punctuation:

We live as we can can as thoughts within your kind and through thought we drive action and with action we bring your world closer to our own.

She could pound a liter of vodka and walk a line and thread a needle and she remembered exactly what had happened.

Here's an example of a sentence that goes on far too long given its limited punctuation:

She'd tried wearing sunglasses to complete her disguise, but with the clouds and the dark she couldn't see shit, kept stepping in it and glass and syringes and tripping and potholes and the last time she'd had a condom dragging from her heel for about four blocks until the cashier at the liquor store pointed it out by yelling in his angry foreigner language.

While there are more examples, it's not like the whole book is like this. Most of the time, Futuro gets it right. If he had hired a proofreader, I believe that the manuscript would've been much cleaner. If commas and long sentences like these don't bother you, then don't sweat it. Just enjoy the story.

While it might seem from my complaints about grammar and the unsympathetic protagonist that I didn't like the story, that isn't the case. I really enjoyed it. Futuro nicely blends cyberpunk and Lovecraftian horror together in a bleak, near future Philadelphia. While his protagonist is about as warm and cuddly as 80 grit sandpaper, she adds a hard-boiled detective element into the mix that works well given the story's setting and plot.

For more information, please visit the author's website.

Low Light by Stanley J. Cutler

Reviewed for The New Podler Review of Books by Libby Cone

This book has a very engaging plot, dealing with a possible explanation for the legendary FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover's predilection for persecuting anyone he deemed Communist or otherwise subversive, while leaving the great organized crime networks of the US relatively untouched. It is common knowledge now that J. Edgar preferred the company of men; it was a career-destroying piece of information in the Twenties, and the only lever with which he could be controlled.

I have lived in Philadelphia for twenty years, and have been to Atlantic City once or twice, and find Cutler's descriptions of old Philly and the honky-tonk sounds and smells of Atlantic City to be quite evocative.

Cutler tells a tale of photographer Al Rubin, who has built a life in the United States after arriving as a penniless immigrant. Still mindful of the racism and anti-Semitism rife in everyday polite American society, he has been able to situate himself in the middle class. Of course, a middle class life in those days could be destroyed if you were a naturalized citizen with too much familiarity with the likes of labor unions, Socialists, and the like. The author mentions the Palmer raids, roundups and deportations of immigrants, legal and illegal, naturalized and non-naturalized, that were named after Woodrow Wilson's Attorney General. It was best to keep a low profile. In an interesting digression towards the end of the book, Al reflects on the gangsters who have tapped him for his services, namely Meyer Lansky and Enoch "Nucky" Johnson, and their ways of smoothing the cognitive dissonance inherent in the trade:

“Meyer was of the Robin Hood school; laws were enacted by an elite group to manage society for its own, narrow benefit. He, born poor, had an obligation to take from them…" Johnson, the Treasurer of Atlantic County, boss of the Republican political machine, and "Czar of the Ritz,"  "…saw himself as the benevolent engineer who kept everything running smoothly." 

Al, in too-infrequent moments of introspection, sees himself being sucked into this demimonde, attracted by the wealth and luxury. He gradually acquires his gangster sea-legs as the plot progresses, to the point of using his boyhood boxing experience without hesitation to get out of a jam. Does he have photos of Hoover in a negligee? Does Meyer? Are the photos destroyed? Hoover is kept guessing, and his weakness for the ponies as well as for tall guys is played like a violin.

I would have liked to see a bit more depth in Al's infrequent soliloquies on being drawn into the life. These are the only portions where Cutler ditches show-don't-tell ("The room pulled at me—I wanted to gamble"..."I didn't want to understand her; I had been completely seduced").

A bit more mention of some characters, such as investigators Dixon and Whitehead, would have been nice, so I didn't have to keep going back to the prologue (or whatever one is to call the pages before Part One), in which Al is spying on, and trying to photograph, Hoover and his lover Clement Talbot in flagrante delicto. The prologue would be perfectly fine in chronological order.

Cutler is spot-on in his research (indeed, I had forgotten that Woodrow Wilson, who is briefly mentioned, died in 1924; I thought he had died in 1920, but my plans to make snarky comments about this being an historical vampire novel were happily foiled). Other minor flaws were mentions of Al and his wife taking mass transit on Shabbos to Meyer Lansky's Bar Mitzvah, which had me busily dog-earing pages, only to be followed several chapters later by the mention that they were Reform Jews, and rather lapsed at that. A little more explanation earlier on would remedy that. I was very amused at one point where, when offered a lobster, Al turns it down in favor of a club sandwich (which contains bacon). It is a brilliant evocation of one of the little cognitive-dissonance smoothings many of us no-longer-really-kosher Jews do. Oh, no, not a big lobster! A little bacon buried in a sandwich? OK. But in Al's case, we have already seen him rationalize blackmail.

Now for the editing. As Al's wife Ida and I both tend to say when perturbed, vay is mir! I will be the first to point out the difficulties of self-publishing: it is extraordinarily difficult to keep some of the conventions in mind, such as not indenting a line of dialogue that starts a paragraph (I am guilty of this and am beating my chest right now). But, oy, the backwards quotation marks! On almost every page yet! Sometimes he uses single quotes, it seems, just for the hell of it. Plus "alright" used so many times, a middle school English teacher would plotz! The restaurant at Nucky's Ritz is called "The Bath and Turf Club." Bath and Turf? Is that a steak on a plate with a loofah? And why do the waitstaff keep changing genders?

The other things that bothered me were the portentous subtitles on the front and back covers. "Birth of Organized Crime in Jazz Age Atlantic City" and "Blackmail FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover," besides being non-grammatical, make the book sound like nonfiction. I only figured out it was a novel when I began reading the contents. A little subtlety instead of subtitles would be nice.

That said, it was an enjoyable read. I hope Mr. Cutler's style and editing really shine in the second and third volumes of what is to be a trilogy.

Author’s web site is: stanleycutler.com