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.

Mobsters, Monsters & Nazis by Dan O'Brien and Steve Ferchaud

Mobsters, Monsters & Nazis is a six-part illustrated series that is a throwback to pulp books. The first installment goes on sale this Halloween, but you can pre-order now.

Mobsters, Monsters & Nazis takes place in an alternate universe where lizard men, fish-faced nightclub owners, and tentacled mobsters are everyday people. Derrick Diamond, a private eye, is tasked with delivering a mysterious artifact to the Fat Man. But there are others who are interested in the artifact, and their intentions appear to be just as malevolent as the titular Nazis. To put it succinctly, Mobsters, Monsters & Nazis is an illustrated short story, so I can't say anything more about the plot as that would spoil it for you.

O'Brien has lovingly crafted his characters with familiar personalities. Derrick Diamond channels Bogart. Ava Harpy is the femme fatale nightclub singer. The Weasel lives up to his name. And the Fat Man is the successful mobster who wields power and conducts his business transactions with shrewd calculation.

Ferchaud's ink drawings capture the noir atmosphere and the essence of the hard-boiled characters. To say that they add a nice touch to the work would be an understatement. While O'Brien's words offer enough visual cues, Ferchaud's work brings it to life.

So if you're a fan of pulp or old gangster films, and don't mind a dash of dark fantasy, check out the first installment of Mobsters, Monsters & Nazis.

A Death on Skid Row

THRESHOLD
by Bonnie Kozek

Available from Amazon.com

Only in her mid-twenties, Honey McGuiness is already an old soul who seems to have lived a life twice as long. A self-described loner and outsider with no connections and no meaningful relationships, she hides from life in a self-imposed exile from society in Los Angeles' Skid Row, wallowing in the gutter along with the rest of the damaged persons. Of course, Honey is not like them; she could be somebody, as one of the other characters insists, but Honey neither believes that, nor does she want to hear it from anyone. There is something dark in Honey's past, something that she's not yet ready to accept and deal with, and that something is killing her chances at life and living.

Honey is not completely isolated, however. There is one person in the world of the homeless that she has a thing for. Not that this thing could ever be anything other than it is, a simple a connection that's pretty special to Honey's jaded self. Billy himself isn't much. For one thing, he is blissfully unaware of the world around him, including Honey's attention. And he communicates in seemingly random rhymes out of the words that he hears around him, like a parrot. But there seems to be something innocent about Billy, something genuine, something that draws Honey. Billy is the only person she cares about.

Working at the urban mission, living in a building targeted by developers, and Billy seem to be the building blocks of Honey's new life in hiding. But Honey's skid row honeymoon from reality is shattered when Billy is shot by unknown assassins. Dying in her arms, he whispers “mother.”

Shattered by the death of her simple friend and thirsting for vengence, Honey launches on an all out, one-woman investigation into Billy's death. That a recording device was strapped to Billy leads Honey to suspect that Billy was being used by the police, a turn of events that she finds particularly upsetting for how the system had used Billy's innocence.

In her quest to get even with the slimy players responsible, Honey encounters the last boyscout, an idealistic cop who still lives by long-gone values of right and wrong, joining the force in order to do some good. The two become close, ersatz partners, each on an idiosynchratic quest for justice. In order to turn up some leads into Billy's death, Honey herself must descend into the local drug scene. The first real contact she meets is Abel, the street boss and drug dealer with an unlikely conscience. But is this the same man whose name is mentioned on the tape she recovered from the recorder on Billy's body? Through Abel she meets another player in the drug scene, Mr. V. But Honey is treading in dangerous waters, for Mr. V knows far more than Honey suspects, and before she knows it her world erupts with violence.

Threshold is stellar writing, a work populated with complex characters, and a story with a hypnotic narrative pull. And Bonnie Kozek is a talent to watch.