Customer Reviews

Lights Out

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Ryan Rossetti and Jake Thomas made Canarsie High School's baseball team nationally ranked; they were both sure shot major leaguers. Jake reached the big leagues where he stars for the Pirates having just completed an all star season hitting 351. However, Ryan saw his pitching career snap to a sudden halt when he tore a ligament. Whereas Jake is making the big bucks in Pittsburgh, Ryan paints houses back home in Brooklyn for less than a living wage.

Now the superstar is coming back to Canarsie to celebrate his great success and to change his image from an out of control hedonist to a caring give something back to the community person. His agent warns Jake to behave because he will most likely face a statutory-rape arrest that could end his chances of obtaining the big endorsements. Thus Jake returns to Brooklyn as a hero, but also to ask his high school sweetheart, Christina Mercado, whose surname he cannot remember, to marry him. Christina realizes she is candy to sweeten Jake's image and is seeing Ryan. At the same time the triangle plays out in New York City, other locals have grudges with one another that will violently disrupt Jake's triumphant return to the place where his glory started.

From the start readers anticipate tempers overflowing as jealousy, anger, and resentment explode and not just with the baseball players. The story line is action-packed from the moment that readers understand the paths taken by the two former Canarsie superstars and never slows down until the final violent walk off homer. Readers who appreciate a powerfully character driven urban noir will enjoy the aptly named Jason Starr's grand slam thriller.

Harriet Klausner

Being a woman who has no interest in competitive sports, I thought I might have less enthusiasm for this Starr novel that centers around a baseball figure, but that is not the case. I ate it like candy. The twisted personalities and dark humor pull you in tight, and the world of the sports star is gripping. My addiction for Starr novels continues.

On one horrible, messy Brooklyn weekend, the lives of Ryan Rosetti and his old high school buddy Jake Thomas intersect with tragic consequences.

Ryan and Jake were rivals on the high school baseball team. Ryan hurt his arm and became a house painter, and Jake went on to play in the major leagues. He is returning home to celebrate getting a ten million dollar signing bonus.

Jake's life is one of orgies, drugs, limos, lawyers, agents and PR people. He is courting his old high school sweetheart, Christina, to plant press stories about an upcoming marriage to quell bad publicity about a threatened statutory rape charge.

Ryan has always loved Christina, and tries to make her see reason--but all she can see is a life in Brooklyn or an easy life for her and her father, although one without love. Her father tells her she can divorce Jake in a few years, with a good settlement. Their lives intersect with some gangster thugs, and shootings, thefts, lies and police investigations follow.

A very dark novel filled with characters caught up in the struggle to survive. They are all trying to make it at different levels: the gangsters, the families in Brooklyn and the wealthy, self-centered sports celebrity.

Armchair Interviews says: A good story of intersecting lives.

This novel is Jason's best novel yet. It's also a bit more complex with alternating and slightly overlapping perspectives that he manages seamlessly. The reader gets multiple perspectives on the same scene. The core of the story is about two guys involved with the same girl and the different approaches to the relationship.

Long-time Starr readers will still find all the same elements they love about his novels--the mean streets of Brooklyn, the unsympathetic characters whose lives are spiraling out of control.

If you've never read one of his books, this would be a good place to start.

This has to be one of the worst books I have ever read. You will not care about what happens to any of the characters, because they are so dumb. I made myself finish this book, only to have it abruptly end without ANY resolution. I feel so jipped. The dialogue is horrible, the characters are despicable, and the plot is bland.

This book is actually two different books. The main plot - a love triangle involving Ryan, Jake and Chrissy - isn't that compelling. None of the characters are particularly likable nor, as a reader, did I care about them a lot.

However, the book has a subplot involving a drug dealer named Saiquan that is absolutely superb. His life is sad and after reading the book I felt like I had a complete understanding of him. The subplot is also written in a somewhat different style than the rest of the book; it reads more like a street lit novel. I'd like to see Jason Starr attempt a book that is written entirely that way.

If there were such a thing as an original crime novelist in this day and age, the closest would be Jason Starr. He writes with a style few other crime novelists possess. He takes the modern, everyday aspects of our lives and melds them into crime novels as faithful to the genre as books from, say, Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. LIGHTS OUT may not be hardboiled crime or even crime noir, but it is still crime in its very essence. Very good crime.

Its premise stems from the classic story dynamic of brother against brother, but even that would be an overly simplistic way of describing it. Jake Thomas and Ryan Rossetti were never friends to begin with. Jason describes them as `acquaintances' turning into bitter competitors and every plot point emphasizes that. Jake succeeds as a baseball player and turns into an egoistic sports star, while Ryan falls short in his dream to be a major league pitcher and thus becomes a house painter. Jake gets the girl, Christina, and cheats on her, while Ryan's the quintessential good guy more deserving of Christina's love instead. These are all palpable and classic struggles, almost fabricated to be as flip-sided as possible.

But what's different is that Jason takes it a step further and makes it even more ambiguous, to the point where even the good guys aren't all good and the bad guys aren't all bad. And most of the time, it is the bad guys who come out on top while the good suffer in the throes of failure. Nothing in the book signifies a turn towards conventional crime storytelling and that's what keeps it interesting and fresh. And because the premise is so human and modern (no mob nonsense here), you will sympathize or, if not, identify with the characters and the seemingly rational thoughts going through their heads. Jason understands that dark, carnal side of people well and he uses this understanding to great effect in the book. The motivations of the characters here never deviates to a point where it gets ridiculous.

Much like Elmore Leonard, the writing's very dialogue driven and the narrative seems intentionally stripped down for the purposes of speed and energy. But Jason's style is grittier and more street-like, and not everyone will appreciate that brand of writing. The important thing here is that Jason writes without fear. He gets his message across with ease and effectiveness, and every page of it shows that. The realistic dialogue never misses a beat as well and, while some lines may come across as clichéd or campy, they always retain a good level of realism in them. The dialogue seeks not to just sound cool but to bring across the characters in a realistic way.

Very dark yet poignant in so many ways, LIGHTS OUT stands up well as an interesting and engaging work of fiction. While it isn't perfect, it does what it sets out to do, which is to show you the dark side of people and that even good people do make irrevocable mistakes once in awhile.

Within a relatively short time, Jason Starr has become a supernova among thriller literary lights, penning dark, gritty novels on his own such as TWISTED CITY and collaborating with the equally brilliant Ken Bruen on BUST. But LIGHTS OUT, Starr's latest novel, is not so much a thriller as it is a dark, brooding character study that falls somewhere between THE WANDERERS by Richard Price and Dennis Lehane's MYSTIC RIVER.

Starr's narrative in LIGHTS OUT possesses an immediacy that simultaneously unsettles and propels. Reading the book is like walking aimlessly and slightly inebriated through a strange city with the only certain knowledge being that each step takes you further away from your hotel and closer to hostile territory. You trust your guardian angel to protect you, even as you know it has flown the coop long ago. So too in LIGHTS OUT; almost from the first pages when we meet the romantic triangle of Ryan Rossetti, Jake Thomas and Christina Mercado, it is obvious that things are going to end badly, despite the good if misguided intentions of some.

Jake is the conquering hero of the novel, the local boy who breaks out of the lower working class Brooklyn neighborhood to become a baseball superstar. LIGHTS OUT begins with Jake's triumphant return to his old Brooklyn neighborhood for a weekend visit, one that he is making more out of a sense of duty than desire. Jake enjoys the trappings of his life --- the limos, the money, the fame, and most of all, the women --- but he only reluctantly fulfills his obligations to his fans, without whom none of the benefits would be happening. Christina, Jake's erstwhile fiancée, is waiting, but she has some news for him, an announcement she is hesitant to give even as she welcomes the opportunity.

In Jake's absence Christina has become involved with Ryan, perhaps the most complex character in the book. Ryan and Jake grew up together and played on the same high school baseball team. More competitors than friends, superstardom was predicted for both. However, their lives took divergent paths; while Jake went on to glory, Ryan labors in the old neighborhood as a housepainter in sullen resentment over what has happened.

Ryan and Jake are badly flawed, in different ways, and they are headed for a collision on the fateful Brooklyn weekend when Jake comes home. Ryan thinks that Christine is going to break things off with him, but he is planning to set a wedding date with Christine --- not out of love, but as a career move. Christine, caught between Jake's manipulation and Ryan's roiling resentment and possessiveness, is a lit match about to be applied to a loaded powder keg. Starr paints his scenes and characters in vivid, startling colors, as he methodically lays out a scenario that is almost certain to end badly for all.

LIGHTS OUT in many ways is Starr's finest work to date, one that should give him the broader audience and recognition he has deserved from the time he first set pen to paper. Highly recommended.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

This has to be the worst book I've read in years. Not one of the cliched characters is worth caring about or developed to any believable degree; the dialogue is ridiculous and smacks of white-guy-trying-to-talk-like-black-guy; the plot is stupid and its "twists" (e.g., Ryan accidentally wandering into the 'hood drunk, getting mugged but talking his way out of it, then getting laid, only to make another enemy who wants to kill him) seem like something the author made up on the spot because he had a deadline that afternoon. No relationships or plotlines are resolved, and everything just peters out,finally, thank God. I've never been so happy to see a book end. Pure garbage.

Lights Out is both similar and different to Mr. Starr's previous works. While his previous works have been shorter in length and smaller in focus, some common elements run through each - a setting in Brooklyn, flawed characters generally unhappy with their place in life, those characters making poor decisions, and mayhem. Oh is there ever mayhem.

Lights Out is a departure in that there are more characters, more relationships, more backstory etc. The characters are richer, and it stretchs across several neighborhoods and their denizens. However, despite it's wider scope, it takes place in about a forty-eight hour period start to finish, and is fairly even paced with action. When there is no action occurring, you can be confident it is around the corner. It is also rich with unhappy people making poor choices, and the inevitable mayhem that ensues.

I would recommend this or any books by Mr. Starr, they're fun, fast, enjoyable and memorable. Once you start one, it's difficult to put down.