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Declan Burke

Absolute Zero Cool Paperback – March 1, 2014

by Declan Burke (Author)

17 ratings

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Absolute Zero Cool is a post-modern take on the crime thriller genre. Adrift in the half-life limbo of an unpublished novel, hospital porter Billy needs to up the stakes. Euthanasia simply isn’t shocking anymore; would blowing up his hospital be enough to see Billy published, or be damned? What follows is a gripping tale that subverts the crime genre’s grand tradition of liberal sadism, a novel that both excites and disturbs in equal measure.

Absolute Zero Cool is not only an example of Irish crime writing at its best; it is an innovative, self-reflexive piece that turns every convention of crime fiction on its head. Declan Burke’s latest book is "an imaginative story that explores the human mind’s ability to both create and destroy, with equally devastating effects."

Print length

224 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Liberties Press
Publication date

March 1, 2014
Dimensions

5.4 x 0.8 x 8.3 inches
ISBN-10

9781907593314
ISBN-13

978-1907593314
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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

A fictional version of writer Burke is confronted by a character from an unfinished novel. Karlsson, the now-corporeal character, is irked at the limbo he has been left in. Burke is under pressure from his publisher to submit his next manuscript, but Karlsson is alternately charming and cheeky, and Burke agrees to let him write his own story, the tale of a poorly paid Irish hospital orderly who euthanizes terminal patients and is planning to blow up the sprawling hospital. Ultimately, Burke is forced to thwart Billy’s (Karlsson renames himself) plan to destroy the hospital. Metafiction? Postmodern noir? These and other labels will be applied to Burke’s newest; any might be apt, but none is sufficient. Absolute Zero Cool is largely a literary novel that draws on history, mythology, and literature to insightfully discuss writing, books, parenting, relationships, health care, and dying with dignity. Bits of Burke’s comic noir (The Big O, 2008) appear, but they serve to subvert the form. Noir fans may not care for this one, but lovers of literary fiction will find much to savor. --Thomas Gaughan

Review

Metafiction? Post Modern noir? These and other labels will be applied to Burke's newest; and might be apt, but none is sufficient. . . . Lovers of literary fiction will find much to savor. --Booklist

[An] ambitious meta-thriller from Irish author Burke. . . Explores the nature of writing and the descent of personal darkness. . . Those looking for a highly intellectual version of Stephen King's The Dark Half will be most satisfied. --Publishers Weekly

ASIN : 1907593314
Publisher : Liberties Press (March 1, 2014)
Language : English
Paperback : 224 pages
ISBN-10 : 9781907593314
ISBN-13 : 978-1907593314
Item Weight : 11.2 ounces
Dimensions : 5.4 x 0.8 x 8.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #4,100,680 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #109,517 in Crime Thrillers (Books)

Customer Reviews:
17 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		24%
4 star		9%
3 star		25%
2 star		25%
1 star		17%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Frank McGrath

Stunningly beautiful and achingly funny

Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2011

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This is not a "crime" book in the normal sense of having a detective, a killer and an an easy to follow plot. It is a stunningly beautiful and achingly funny work which probes the type of existential questions raised by works like "Notes from Underground" and "Crime and Punishment" by Dostoyevsky, and works by Sartre, Camus ("The Plague"), Kafka, and Ireland's Beckett and Flann O'Brien.
It is an anti-novel, in that the connecting thread is the author's tone and voice, which produces such gems as "His face is deelpy lined, but softly, so he resembles a post-coital Beckett." and a remark that could have been made of any of Beckett's characters: "If there's one thing women love more than talking, it's talking about talking." (Think "Happy Days." - "Debs adds a few more strokes of blusher to the masterpiece-in-progress that is her perception of herself")
The basic storyline centres around Billy Karlsson and his plan to blow up a hospital. He provides the same type of justifications as Raskolnikov provides for killing the old woman in "Crime and Punishment" - the type of justifications used by the Nazis and a certain Norwegian currently in the news. The author dialogues with Karlsson, probing his rationale, and in so doing probes the rationale of all of society's outcasts and "rebels."
This is classic and will be read in a hundred years' time, when many contemporary bestsellers are long forgotten. Read it!

10 people found this helpful

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Denman

Absolute Zero Interest

Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2013

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I could neither follow the first few chapters of this novel nor care enough about the characters to bother trying to figure it out.

One person found this helpful

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Lance Charnes

The very definition of meta

Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2017

We writers of fiction often talk about our characters as if they're real people. The characters talk to us; they misbehave when we try to make them do something they don't want to; they change the plot or do things that surprise us. Given the high incidence of neurosis among us ink-stained wretches, this isn't as alarming as it would be for, say, convenience-store clerks. But what if a character actually came alive... and had a bone to pick with the author?

That's the setup for Absolute Zero Cool, Declan Burke's fantasia on writing, health care, sociopathy and explosives.

There are two point-of-view characters: a thinly-disguised Declan Burke, writer of serio-comic Irish crime novels; and Billy, who also goes by Karlsson, a character in one of The Author's abandoned novels, who wants to reinvent himself and get the novel done so he can properly come alive. In that Billy has regular meetings with The Author and other people can see him, it would seem that he's quite alive enough, but never mind that. The Author gets involved in the project against his better instincts and finishes the story -- which happens to be about a sociopathic hospital porter who blows up his own hospital.

If you look up the definition of "meta" in Wiktionary, you'll find a picture of this novel's cover. The fictional Burke dishes on his own books, decries the state of modern publishing, and deals with a new child and an understandably skeptical wife. Billy decides he'd rather write part of his story himself, and does, trading editorial notes (more usually, barbs), with The Author. Karlsson (the version of Billy that The Author created and whom Billy wants to reform) is writing his own novel, Sermo Vulgis, which reads like Henry Miller on crack, and which Billy and The Author criticize. Somewhere in all of this there's a plot of sorts (Billy/Karlsson's plotting to demolish the hospital in the service of a constantly shifting portfolio of complaints and ideologies) which The Author and Billy also criticize; their changes end up in the parts of the novel that we follow as Billy's in-novel POV.

Does any of that make sense to you? If it does, are you ready for 238 pages of it? If so, here's your book. Enjoy.

If you stop trying to make sense of it all and just go with it, the story is pretty entertaining, even if it it does regularly threaten to become a literary ouroboros. Burke (both the real-world and in-book versions) has a mordant sense of humor and a gift for making even the oddest dialog sound real. You can hear the Irish lilt in the various narrative voices without descending into dialect. The character-as-a-real-person conceit is hardly unique (I can just imagine Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next popping up here) but Burke owns it. Billy becomes enough of a real person to help us forget he's a literary device, grounding that we certainly can use.

Why only four stars? This is a book that's easier to respect than to love; it's audacious, sure, but you'll never lose sight of the fact that Burke's screwing with you on every page. You probably won't come to like any of the characters. The crime plot regularly starts and stops as the characters take care of their postmodernist business. Karlsson's novel-within-a-novel-within-a-novel is strange and disturbing, but not in a way that adds much to his character; even Billy and The Author debate whether to take it out, but unfortunately never do. Finally, the two major female characters never advance much past being scolds and wet blankets.

Absolute Zero Cool is a tour de force literary experiment loosely wrapped in a genre cloak. If you like your narratives deconstructed and self-referential, you'll find much to enjoy here. If you're looking for a straight-ahead Celtic crime novel with a proper plot and characters, look elsewhere (perhaps to one of Burke's other novels).

Helpful

Braz

Absolutely Cool

Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2011

Billy Karlsson is a disgruntled hospital porter; an urban Raskolinikov; an existentialist powder keg waiting to explode. An angry young man who has hatched a plan to blow up a hospital in order to vent his revenge on the world. But there are one or two obsticles in his way, the biggest being that he isn't real. Karlsson is, in fact, a charcter in a long-shelved, unfinished, black novel by writer Declan Burke.

And Burke really has no plans to resurrect that novel or the character of Billy Karlsson. He's a father now. A successful writer of comic crime novels. He's happy. The bile and the bitterness that caused him to create Karlsson have melted away in the warmth of fatherhood.

Which does not make Billy very happy at all. And so he tracks down Burke and persuades -cajoles- him to bring him back to life. And he does. And this is Absolute Zero Cool.

Absolute Zero Cool is probably an example of meta-fiction or post modernism or something or other. I really wouldn't know about that.

What I do know is that is a very clever novel that could be annoying and smart arse in the wrong hands.

However, AZC is in the right hands. The same capable hands that created the classic comic crime double header of The Big O and Crime Always Pays. The hands of a master storyteller. And with those hands, Declan Burke has crafted an exciting, hilarious, thoughtful and moving story that will surely stand up to- and deserve-a lot of re-reading. I've read a lot of cracking novels this year but Absolute Zero Cool is my favorite.And it could well be yours, too.

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

andy60chemist

Flann O'Brian it is not

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 7, 2013

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Described as comedy detective, certainly challenged the trades description act as far as I was concerned. Funny peculiar certainly. I found the characters too confusing and it took me way too long to identify fiction from reality. I could not relate to the main character's malevolent attitude to his authority figures. I am surprised that I finished it, but the irony of the conclusion should not be missed.

tram22

All things are possible

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 1, 2012

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I have read it twice and had different, but very positive, responses each time.
The first time, I admired the intricacy and genre bending ambition of the writing technique. This wasn't like any crime novel I had ever read, in a very good way.
The second time, I just enjoyed the story.
A winner, and Burke has joined my select list of must read authors.

F. MASSEN

Original, somewhat confusing, but interesting to read

Reviewed in Germany on September 11, 2013

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This is an interesting to read book, but after having finished it you will think "this will be it ", too much originality becomes tiring... so let's hope that the next book of the author does not continue on this same rails...

Léa

OK but kind of forgettable

Reviewed in France on September 8, 2013

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There were quite a few very witty and clever sentences in this book. It was reasonably entertaining, but not much more. The story itself seemed badly structured to me. A guy has written a book but never published it. He starts to rewrite it, when the main (fictional) character shows up to help him. What? The real author doesn't have any normal reaction to this. It was so odd that I thought I had misunderstood something.

L. Ray

It must be me, because others gave it 4 stars!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 18, 2013

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I couldn't get into this book and abandoned it. Perhaps I just didn't read enough to get it, because I did the same with the film Fight Club, watched 20 minutes and then waited about 2 years before I watched it again and loved it. So ask me again in 2 years time!

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