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juushikaTitle: No Dogs in Philly (Private Justice Book 1)
Author: Andy Futuro
Published: June Day Press, 2014
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 166
Total Page Count: 158,913
Text Number: 464
Read Because: review copy sent to me by the author
Review: In dystopic/futuristic Philadelphia, Private Investigator Saru is tasked by a superhuman business corporation to find a young girl who carries the only weapon that can fight an encroaching eldritch enemy. No Dogs in Philly is, obviously, a busy mishmash of genres: cyberpunk, dystopian, noir, urban fantasy, and Lovecraftian—never boring, but not always successful, and no greater than the sum of these parts. Saru is such an unlikable and unconvincing* antihero that she stifles the urban fantasy/noir aspects, rendering them reiterative and joyless. But the cyberpunk dystopia meshes with the Lovecraftian to make for an engrossing, creative world which is easily the book's strength—in all its gruesome glory. I would have been sold on No Dogs in Philly were it from Ria's point of view: there's such potential in a streetsmart girl haunted by eldritch powers in the form of a guard dog, and it goes woefully unexplored; if she were the protagonist, we could dump the tiresome grizzled detective plot and still engage the book's world and themes. As it is, I admire the intent but not the effect, and don't recommend it; readers with more appetite for urban fantasy/noir aspects may have better luck.
This is self-published but adequately edited; there's some incorrect punctuation, most noticeably missing vocative commas, but nothing worse.
* This will seem like bizarre nitpicking, but: people with breasts don't constantly narrate the state of their breasts—and, more than that, they don't get gut feelings ... in their breasts. The spidey-sense "tingling tits" were so outlandish and unconvincing that I was never able to look beyond them.
Author: Andy Futuro
Published: June Day Press, 2014
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 166
Total Page Count: 158,913
Text Number: 464
Read Because: review copy sent to me by the author
Review: In dystopic/futuristic Philadelphia, Private Investigator Saru is tasked by a superhuman business corporation to find a young girl who carries the only weapon that can fight an encroaching eldritch enemy. No Dogs in Philly is, obviously, a busy mishmash of genres: cyberpunk, dystopian, noir, urban fantasy, and Lovecraftian—never boring, but not always successful, and no greater than the sum of these parts. Saru is such an unlikable and unconvincing* antihero that she stifles the urban fantasy/noir aspects, rendering them reiterative and joyless. But the cyberpunk dystopia meshes with the Lovecraftian to make for an engrossing, creative world which is easily the book's strength—in all its gruesome glory. I would have been sold on No Dogs in Philly were it from Ria's point of view: there's such potential in a streetsmart girl haunted by eldritch powers in the form of a guard dog, and it goes woefully unexplored; if she were the protagonist, we could dump the tiresome grizzled detective plot and still engage the book's world and themes. As it is, I admire the intent but not the effect, and don't recommend it; readers with more appetite for urban fantasy/noir aspects may have better luck.
This is self-published but adequately edited; there's some incorrect punctuation, most noticeably missing vocative commas, but nothing worse.
* This will seem like bizarre nitpicking, but: people with breasts don't constantly narrate the state of their breasts—and, more than that, they don't get gut feelings ... in their breasts. The spidey-sense "tingling tits" were so outlandish and unconvincing that I was never able to look beyond them.
