Michael Point doesn't seem anything special. He dresses conservatively, is thoughtful, methodical and well spoken. He also happens to kill people for a living. It's not about getting back at the world; for Michael it's much simpler than that: It's All About The Money. But things are starting to get strange: his hits are coming back to life and trying to kill him. Is he losing his mind? Or could it be that the things he sees aren't delusions at all, but hints of a divine conflict: a heavenly war, sucking him in...?
Contract
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Editorial Reviews
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'a tour de force' -- Times 'Spurrier is very, very good' -- SFX Magazine
About the Author
Simon Spurrier was born in 1981. After completing a degree in Film and Television Production at S.I.A.D, he was awarded a screenplay bursary with the National Academy of Writing and found employment with the BBC as an Art Director. He has since become a key contributor to the UK's foremost Graphic Novel ideas-factory 2000AD and has written several licensed works for The Black Library and Abaddon Press. He lives in North London.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Capitalization, Repetition, and Imagery... ohoyes.,
By
This review is from: Contract (Paperback)
There are two authors that I discovered and became fans of long before I read any of their work, before I had any plans at all of reading their work. The first is Warren Ellis-the comics writer, not the musician-whom I found during one of those distracted hikes through the bowels of Wikipedia. For what may have been hours, maybe days, I absentmindedly clicked away at each and every link until I found this author who came to be known as the Internet Jesus. I became a fan near instantly and I read his work, starting with Crooked Little Vein, some time later. The other author just happens to be Si Spurrier and I found him through Warren Ellis. For months I was following him on Twitter and reading his weekly columns over at Bleeding Cool for months before I even learned he had any novels out-he is a comics writer, but I am afraid that is not my preoccupation. For the record, it is named Contract, just in case that was not at all obvious.
I had issues with Contract. Some of these issues are minor gripes and others are enough to make sane readers turn away to preserve their mental faculties. That being said, let's talk about capitalization. There are people who think that capitalization should be limited to proper nouns and the beginnings of sentences. I am apt to agree with them, if only because I know there is someone out there who thinks he is being clever by capitalizing nothing at all. Then there are those folks, mostly writers, who are more than comfortable with capitalizing random words, thereby turning them into something else. This bothers some people, this does not bother me. It can be used to great effect and one of my favorite novels, Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith, is an example of this. Then there are those people who can be described as overzealous. Contract fits into the latter group. At this juncture I am actively rebelling against myself. There is a part of me that wants to say that this over use capital letters is A Bad Thing. Another part of me is saying that it is not so much A Bad Thing as it is annoying. I feel I should note that annoying is often synonymous with bad in my lexicon, so this internal spat amounts to no more than some added words in a review. This capitalization thing, it is something that might be bothersome or hardly noticeable given the subjective nature of taste. For me, it was a Distraction, it was Bothersome, it was Annoying, but mostly it was A Bad Thing. ---"This is the world as a mole hears it. This is a filtered thing of bristle-noses and scratching claws. This is what it's like to be buried in the earth, six feet down, with just worms and taproots and maggots for company." ~Contract, Page 133--- This is me wishing I had an electronic format of this book so I could do a search and copy the passage directly. This is one of many passages written the in the same style found throughout the book. This is only one example of the sanity-reaping repetition that pervades the novel. This is a comfortable rut that the narrative falls in and traverses time and time and time and time and time again. At some point I got used to the repetition or as close to getting used to it as I could. It fits with the prose, it fits with the character, it fits with the narrative, but that does not make it any less annoying. Sentence structure, descriptions, methods, music-if you missed any one of these the first time, then you can be sure that they will be back again later and sometimes in nearly the same exact wording as before. This is also A Bad Thing, even if it does fit the narrative like a glove. Despite the above two, I have no actual complaints about the prose. It is sharply written and often staccato, the perfect match a noir thriller like Contact. However, beyond that, beyond the simplicity of it being a crime novel, there are the weird bits. There is heaven and there is hell, and Michael Point sees both infused with the reality around him. These moments, whether they are his fragmented sanity crumbling just a little further or the real deal, they are Highly Detailed. One could call it description, I prefer to call it imagery. These are the scenes that poke your imagination and force it to finally get around to doing some work. I could easily visualize the world going to hell around Point and I loved every minute of it. The imagery is well done throughout the novel, but none come close to matching the impressiveness of those hellish scenes, those possible hallucinations. They are the highlight of the novel, but that does not mean the rest of the novel is slacking. The characterization, as far as the main character is concerned, is profound, but the same cannot be said for the secondary characters, who, as per usual, are put off to the side to weave in and out of the narration at random points. As per usual-this lack of characterization for secondary characters is something that stop bothering me long ago and, as such, is no longer a negative for me. This does not go for everyone, but it should be mentioned that the secondary characters do not get much time on screen to be developed in any case. The story here is a damn good one, enough so that my issues with the repetition and capitalization were made small enough to ignore. Contact is fast-paced, humorous, tangentially delicious with its borrowed wisdom, and straddles the border between Serious Novel and Fricking Weird. It is that last bit that makes it what it is, what makes it so damned interesting that you have to continue, and what drives the twist of an ending that I could not guess until it already playing out. And the one last thing I have to say to you, to those of you who have managed to make it through this rambling, disjointed, review, is this: Read this book. Buy it or borrow it, it is well worth the read.
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Self distraction is the new self-destruction, which was yesterdays self improvement",
By Jacob "Word loving college student with a 2+ ... (Cedar Rapids, IA, United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Contract (Paperback)
Contract is a book that is both satisfying and frustrating. The narrative structure is unique and Spurrier proves himself more than capable of telling a story through the eyes of Michael Point.
While the narrative is scattered and I would sometimes find myself frustrated with the way the story was told, this is the way he meant it to be. Michael Point's mental state is brilliantly captured as the novel progresses. However, I sometimes felt like the character of Michael Point was more of a gimmick than he was a person. That is not to say he lacked depth, he has much of it, it just stands that his entire character was based on denying these crime fiction cliches and I somehow felt that whatever the legitimacy of the character has was lost by the end of the book when he seemed to have folded into the niche. This book is not for everyone. However if you like Crime Fiction, Warren Ellis, Charlie Huston, etc you will get a decent ride in Spurrier's debut novel. This doesn't shatter preconceptions of what a crime novel should be, however it does have an interesting voice and is more than worth a purchase should you find yourself looking for something to read.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
American Psycho x Felix Castor,
By
This review is from: Contract (Paperback)
Contract (2007) is the story of Michael Point, who, by his own admission isn't particularly smart, funny or wise. However, Michael does have an impressively absent set of moral values - he's in it for the money. An impressively manipulative societal predator, he also understands how to make himself noticed or unnoticed, to get laid or to be ignored.
His predatory cunning and mercenary ethics all add up to one profession: a hitman. And he's very good at it. In fact, Michael is so good at killing that he's been recruited by a mysterious group called "The Choir" to do a series of hits. The prize is immense, but they're high-profile and, more importantly, messy. The dead? They keep coming back. Spurrier's style - something akin to Bret Easton Ellis' - is incredibly disconcerting. The reader is bombarded with paragraphs of Aztec gods, shopping lists, Internet trivia and instructions for building a silencer. Most of Contract is from Michael's point of view, but the occasional snippet of diary entry from his confidante Sally is enough to show us that he's a) unreliable and b) not nearly as cool as he thinks he is. The purpose of the book seems to be to pose as many questions as possible about the narrator's perceptions and then, largely, shrug them off. Contract isn't an easy read. Michael is a collapsing, predatory, macho narrator who generates little sympathy - and, aside from a few clever witticisms, Contract lacks the goofy, self-awareness of The Culled. Contract is not over the top - which makes it all the more disturbing. Interesting, Contract is redeemed at the end. The sense of an Epic Supernatural Plot is largely ignored for the more human drama of Michael quest for purpose. Underneath all the layers of hallucination and distorted perception, Spurrier cleverly weaves everything together, culminating in an excellent final "reveal" and brilliantly-executed ending. Contract is a book about a side character, a "disposable" (as Michael would say) in the great scheme.
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