Customer Reviews

The Serialist (Library Edition)

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I loved so much about this novel--its wonderful and witty narrative voice, the laugh-out-loud humor, the many entertaining asides about writers and writing, and perhaps most of all, its heart. The main character is a likable hack who pens pulp fiction and kids' term papers while dreaming about publishing successful novels under his own name. His chance at fame (if not acclaim) comes with an invitation to tell the tale of the infamous, soon-to-be-executed Photo Killer.

With one of his cute blond teenage tutorees as business manager--the totally delightful, razor-witted Claire--our hero takes the challenge and steps right into it: an apparent set-up where he gets framed. Three incredibly grisly murders committed in the unmistakable style of his serial murderer ensue. That's where I almost couldn't keep reading. Gordon is such a powerful writer that he describes this mutilation in a way most genre writers don't. The victims are all women the protagonist has just interviewed, and their deaths seem too nauseatingly close and real, unlike the deaths in so much mystery fiction. In a story that had been primarily light-hearted with funny references to porn and S & M before this point, it was a shocking change of tone for me and made some of the later sexist remarks and sexual jokes seem off-key.

The book IS a wonderfully original blend of genres, which was both a major delight and also perhaps the source of this occasional incongruity. For the most part I simply enjoyed what the author was doing and how beautifully he pulled it off, crafting a novel that's alternately hilarious, moving, horrible, suspenseful, trashy, literary, thought-provoking, self-reflective, engrossing, and an ode to storytelling all in one job. The only `misteps' came with a few implausibilities in the mystery-solving and the aforementioned tension between parody and reality. Those aspects may well have been intentional since so many mysteries ARE in fact riddled with implausibility, and murder really IS horrible and sickening rather than entertaining and light. This was a book that made me laugh and think and feel and care, even more than I wanted to at times. I'm ready for the next installment!

Harry Bloch finds himself far from his dreams, single and living with his mother in a two bedroom apartment in Queens. Lover of books and literature, Harry pens serial novels, sci fi, porn, pulp fiction and vampires, as well as penning an advice column for Raunchy magazine. Barely making ends meet, he is invited to co-write the memoirs of a vicious serial killer on Death Row. The catch is that he must meet and greet in the Biblical fashion some of the Death row groupies who have written to the inmate. As these women wind up murdered in exactly in the same brutal manner as the crimes the inmate was convicted of, Harry becomes the prime suspect. Soon he finds his quiet life turned upside down as he realizes he is more of a pawn than a partner. Aided by a cast of quirky characters and his own writings, he learns the truth about the killings and himself.

This was a great read. The cast of characters, from the precocious teen to the stripper sister of one of the murder victims, are deftly handled. Most of the characters are out of central casting,( the gruff FBI investigator, the chain smoking lawyer, the creepy,handsome convict and the true believer legal intern) would be clownish in less capable hands. Bloch is an engaging voice, wry and cynical. A wistful underachiever, he rises to the challenge when his life and the lives of the ones he loves (and some he barely knows) are threatened.

Ultimately this novel is more about acceptance than finding oneself. The wealthy teen "orphan with parents" drops her pseudo sophistication when the bullets start flying and realizes she is just a kid. The bad girl stripper realizes that she really is a good girl after all. And Harry comes to peace with who he is because the bottom line is people would much rather read the tabloids than the Times and there's nothing wrong with that.

It's cliche to talk about a book you just can't put down, but i guess even that's not quite right here. What happened to me with this book was that i picked it up to skim the first few pages and ended up reading the first hundred.

The story itself is well done, with a good dash of suspense, but nothing so riveting that you'd skip a meal intentionally rather than set the book aside for an hour. What gets you is the flow of the story; there are no ebbs, no peaks and troughs, no place where you need to put the book aside to catch your breath, or want to put the book aside because it's gotten temporarily dull. It is, simply, a very well-paced book, which is a staggering achievement for a first-time novelist.

Our narrator is an author of cheap genre novels and porn columns, keenly aware of his own mediocrity and only occasionally mourning the brilliant writing career he once planned. He gets an offer to write the memoirs of a serial killer on death row, and takes it as an opportunity for name recognition and, of course, money. Inevitably, he's roped into a murder-mystery with his motley band of sidekicks.

The big let-down in this novel is that the mystery is solved not through any real detective work but rather a series of genius insights from a man repeatedly demonstrated to be well short of clever. As a reader, i always feel cheated by such turns. But i wasn't able to figure out who the antagonist was before the reveal, so the author gets props for that.

Only for a small chunk near the end of the book does the author engage in the sort of self-absorbed maudlin melodrama to which authors writing about authors are prone. You can see it coming and skim those paragraphs if you want. There are several other patches of introspection and philosophizing throughout the book, but those are actually part of the story and compelling.

Thrown into this book for reasons not entirely clear are chapters from the supposed books the protagonist as written. They're amusing, often downright corny, and i suppose intended to give us a sense of the kind of garbage the character bangs out so he can pay the rent. They do little to advance the plot, but i think the book would be worse off without them.


(A note: for any potential reader worried about this novel being smutty, fear not. The most graphic sexual scenes are brief and tame. There's more allusion to the protagonists porn-writing career than actual sexual content.)

The Serialist starts out wonderfully - a mix of satire, mystery and a funny examination of the mind of a hack writer.

But about halfway through, the tone changes, sickening details are shoved in the reader's face and the previous jauntiness of tone disappears. The net effect of this tonal shift is to make the previously enjoyable characters like Harry and Claire seem just as artificial and as unbelievable as the other characters who emerge.

I almost spoiled the mystery at the centre if the novel, but if, like me, you stick with The Serialist until the bitter end, you'll probably be scratching your head and trying to figure ou how the killer was able to carry out the murders. Logistically, it doesn't make sense, and sadly, the last third of this novel also makes little sense.

Which would be fine, I guess, if the book hadn't also stopped being enjoyable as well.

So, if you like graphic descriptions of dismembered women, then maybe you'll enjoy the last half of The Serialist. If not, I strongly suggest you look elsewhere for your next summer bvook.

In David Gordon's delightfully bent new crime novel "The Serialist," pulpy detective noir gets an enthusiastic shot of satiric edge. Gordon clearly loves the art of writing and the conventions of genre fiction. It is this passion that invigorates every page of his rollicking adventure and turns "The Serialist", almost, into a post-modern course in storytelling. Breaking the fourth wall immediately to speak directly to the reader, Harry Bloch (a second rate writer and a very unlikely hero) outlines how important it is to deliver the perfect first line in a novel. So it is with some amusement that we don't actually kick off the story until the end of the first chapter. And that first line is a doozy--even if technically it isn't the first line!

Bloch has achieved some literary success. Under various pseudonyms, he has penned popular fictional series containing sci-fi love slaves, Blaxploitation detectives, and romantic vampire entanglements. When a convicted serial killer reaches out to his favorite porno writer, it happens to be one of Bloch's alter egos. Given the chance of a lifetime to ghostwrite the memoirs of the notorious mass murderer, Bloch cannot resist. But it may just be a deal with the devil as new murders start to occur wherever our intrepid researcher goes. When he becomes implicated, what's left but to solve the case and prove his innocence? With an assortment of colorful allies including a stripper bent on revenge and his adolescent business partner, Bloch's detective work proves to be as hilarious as it is harrowing.

David Gordon stays true to classic detective noir while at the same time skewering it--it is a precision act. While the book loses some of its humor as it races to the appropriately convoluted conclusion, the satire is spot on and, often times, laugh out loud funny. If that weren't enough, we are also treated to various ridiculous chapters from Harry Bloch's other books to parallel the main action. It's an unconventional device that adds much depth to the argument that "The Serialist" is really a paean to writers everywhere. Boldly inventive, with heart and wit to spare, "The Serialist" is great fun and, most assuredly, recommended.

The Serialist starts strong-in the first 20 pages, I thought this was the best novel I'd read for a while. It's a great set-up-Harry Bloch, a struggling writer who toils in the trenches of genre fiction while his ex-girlfriend runs with a higher-class literary crowd. Gordon really nails the struggling genre-writer thing, and he creates a character who's painfully aware of his own short-comings.

Then the plot kicks in, with Bloch being commissioned by a serial killer on death row to do some freelance work. From there, the writer's pulled into the story, and must play detective for high stakes in a deadly game of cat and mouse (yes, I know I'm mixing metaphors...I'm paying homage to the genre). To me, once you've got bodies turning up, the story gets much less engaging. Serial killers are just about all the same: they're narcissistic sadists. Struggling writers, though, come in all different shades of desperation and failure. There's just more room for real novelty (and literary experimentation) there. I know there are probably way too many writers writing about writing, but to me it's more fun to read that than a writer writing about serial killers. If you like grisly, though, you'll get your fill.

It's still a good slice of crime genre fiction, and it's an interesting twist on the concept of a writer (or editor) getting entangled in his story, much like Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, but tending towards the pulps rather than the esoterics. Could have done without the Al Gore reference in one of the stories, though-if it's earnest, oh please, and if it's ironic, that was maybe too subtle. In any event, it took me out of the story and got me thinking about the politics of climatology, which probably wasn't the author's intention.

At the end, it was an entertaining book, and decent crime fiction. By half-way through, I wasn't as entranced as I was in those first 20 pages, but it still delivered something good.

This is a book about a writer, a man in New York, who supports himself by writing things which appear to be written by other people. This leads to some fairly funny situations. He has lost his girlfriend to "serious" writing and a "serious writer". Actually, this novel seems to be a bit of a satire about the writing life and the whole conceit of being a writer. It is a fresh angle to a story and is enjoyable for a droll look at this segment of the New York intelligentsia set. Added to this is a serial killer element as our hero begins writing for a serial killer who is on death row. It is great to see someone turn the glut of serial killer novels on its head in satire and black humor for a change. Definitely a fun and different read.

Harry Bloch, the protagonist of David Gordon's noir satire "The Serialist," is a hack writer who dispenses cheese under a variety of pen names in any number of odd genres from paranormal romance to sci-fi porn. He's not above putting on women's clothing a la Norman Bates to pose for jacket photographs when his nom de plume happens to be female, or pretending to be an African-American to write blaxploitation trash. Hey, it's a living. The thing about Bloch is, he clearly knows what good fiction is, but being a man of the world he also knows there's no way he could make his living writing anything but trash. So, trash he writes.

Throughout the novel, Gordon winks at the reader by reproducing excerpts from Bloch's horrible pulp fiction, bringing us in on the joke. The satire is so good I found myself wishing I could read works like _Crimson Darkness Falls_ and _Whither Thou Goest, Oh Slutship Commander_ in their entirety. _Crimson Darkness Falls_, for example, is a vampire novel that blatantly panders to its bored female readership while flattering them with pseudo-historical claptrap (one of the characters in it is searching for "The Holy Sword of Mithras," a faux-scholarly reference worth the price of the book alone). "The Serialist" abounds with such clever features, including Bloch's spot-on pen names (the fantasy writer is called "TRL Pangstrom.").

Things take a dark turn when Bloch becomes involved with a serial killer on death row named Darian Clay. Clay makes a deal with Bloch, a deal-with-the-devil only slightly worse than the one Bloch has already engineered for himself by writing garbage under pretend names. Clay will give Bloch the exclusive rights to his life story. In return, Bloch has to go interview women who have written Clay sexually-charged pen pal letters and turn their fantasies into private porn for Clay. When three of these women turn up dead, murdered in Clay's signature style, Bloch becomes a prima suspect. From there, the novel becomes a conventional mystery whodunit with noir flavor that rolls on to a satisfactory conclusion.

The postmodern satirical irony was the best part of this book for me. If you like genre fiction, like I do, chances are you will get a kick out of "The Serialist."

I throughly enjoyed reading The Serialist. It was clear and easy to read, had short chapters that were engaging and moved at a good pace.

There are five parts to the novel that take place over a few months in 2009. A recently unsuccessful author, Harry Bloch, gets an offer to write the memoirs of a serial killer - Darian Clay, the Photo Killer. Bloch's rather unconventional research leads to more murders, Photo Killer style, and Bloch is on the short list. To clear himself, he must solve the murders.

Many of the main characters start out as cookie cutter and standard for a murder mystery/thriller, but the author turns them into the most colorful, hysterical group I've read about in a book of this genre. Interspersed are chapters from Bloch's various works of pulp fiction, giving the novel an extra layer of humor. Gordon has a very clever writing style. The book was well done; one of the best I've read this year.

This definitely is a treat for those of us who appreciate the pulp style of fiction. The narrative is penned by a writer who had greast aspirations as a writer, but instead ends up making a living by writing formulaic genre fiction. A convicted serial killer on death row is a fan and contracts the writer to ghost write his autobiography, but with a definite hook. This becomes a challenging whodunnit which verges on graphic sadism at times, but shouldn't be too strong for the average reader of thrillers. This is a most promising debut and left me hoping for more from the author..