Drug dealers, hustlers, brothels, dirty politics, corrupt cops . . . and sorcery. Welcome to Low Town. In the forgotten back alleys and flophouses that lie in the shadows of Rigus, the finest city of the Thirteen Lands, you will find Low Town. It is an ugly place, and its cham pion is an ugly man. Disgraced intelligence agent. Forgotten war hero. Independent drug dealer. After a fall from grace five years ago, a man known as the Warden leads a life of crime, addicted to cheap violence and expensive drugs. Every day is a ...
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Drug dealers, hustlers, brothels, dirty politics, corrupt cops . . . and sorcery. Welcome to Low Town. In the forgotten back alleys and flophouses that lie in the shadows of Rigus, the finest city of the Thirteen Lands, you will find Low Town. It is an ugly place, and its cham pion is an ugly man. Disgraced intelligence agent. Forgotten war hero. Independent drug dealer. After a fall from grace five years ago, a man known as the Warden leads a life of crime, addicted to cheap violence and expensive drugs. Every day is a constant hustle to find new customers and protect his turf from low-life competition like Tancred the Harelip and Ling Chi, the enigmatic crime lord of the heathens. The Warden's life of drugged iniquity is shaken by his dis covery of a murdered child down a dead-end street . . . set ting him on a collision course with the life he left behind. As a former agent with Black House--the secret police--he knows better than anyone that murder in Low Town is an everyday thing, the kind of crime that doesn't get investi gated. To protect his home, he will take part in a dangerous game of deception between underworld bosses and the psy chotic head of Black House, but the truth is far darker than he imagines. In Low Town, no one can be trusted. Daniel Polansky has crafted a thrilling novel steeped in noir sensibilities and relentless action, and set in an original world of stunning imagination, leading to a gut-wrenching, unforeseeable conclusion. Low Town is an attention-grabbing debut that will leave readers riveted . . . and hun gry for more.
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I have been reading a good deal of history of late and welcomed the opportunity to read a different type of book such as the gritty, noir literature I enjoy. I also was interested in this new novel, "Low Town" because its young author, 26-year old Daniel Polansky, had been a student of philosophy in college, as I had been long ago.
"Low Town" is a mixture of noir and fantasy. These two types of genre writing seem incongruous at first. Noir demands a strong sense of place. a hardness, and a sense of realism. These qualities don't seem to mix well with fantasy. But for the most part, this book works. The book is set in Low Town, which is the tawdry lowlife section in a city called Rigus in a country called the Thirteen Lands. It is hard to put a time on this story, Many of the traits of Rigus are loosely medieval but some a strikingly modern. (A grand piano is a fixture in some of the scenes.) But the world of the book differs in externals from places people know. Polansky has developed an elaborate story for his Thirteen Lands, replete with terminology for coinage and officialdom, its social structure, its own drugs of choice, and its gods and goddesses and theology. It is not a modern world, as Polansky's story relies heavily on sorcerers (there is a prestigious school for sorcery in the Thirteen Lands) and strange and unbelievable powerful and vile monsters conjured from the Beyond. Sorcery and monsters are ordinarily not the stuff of noir.
The noir elements of the story also are recognizable and ultimately are predominant in this book. The setting in Low Town, with its overcrowded conditions, alleys, poverty, crime, bars, drugs, flophouses, and unsavory characters would be at home in virtually any large city. It has a sense of familiarity. The book's hero, a taciturn, hard 35-year old man called Warden is a prototypical noir figure. Warden grew up on the streets where he appeared headed for a life of crime. He was given the opportunity to escape this life and served in the army and in Rigus' cruelly efficient secret police, headquartered in a place called the Black House. But the Warden left Black House in disgrace and went back to his life of selling and using drugs in Low Town and running what appears to be a crime syndicate. As a good noir hero, Warden has a vulnerable side. He is especially protective of young children facing the vicissitudes of life on the streets. He rescues several such children, with varying results, during the course of the story.
Much of the book, as with noir, takes place in a bar. It is called the Staggering Earl which the Warden owns together with the proprietor, a crude, large garrulous individual named Adolphus. Adolphus and the Warden are fast friends and in their differences complement each other. The characters of the various people in the book, especially the Warden, are developed slowly and by indirection, with considerable subtlety. The writing is sharp, observant, and pithy.
The plot turns on the murders of three small children, two girls and a boy, in Low Town over a short time. Although he has been cashiered from the police force, the Warden is brought in to solve the crimes at the threat of excruciating torture and death if he does not succeed within a week. Warden is diligent, ruthless, and efficient, if not always perceptive. He is double and triple crossed and follows many blind leads. The book is replete with fighting, violence of every stripe, and much graphically described killing. Amulets, sorcerers and monsters have an integral role in the book.
As part of the pre-release publicity for "Low Town", Polansky identified Dashiell Hammett, Tolkien, and Quentin Tarantino as among the influences on the book. This novel appears to be the first in what will become a series. Polansky has done something novel and creative in this mixture of noir and fantasy. The book shows, as Polansky suggests in his pre-release interview, that human nature remains constantly recognizable in all its guises even when the surroundings are imagined. To my reading, the book is weakened in its element of fantasy as opposed to realism of the noir genre. But readers enjoying fantasy settings may well be intrigued by this noir story of murder toughness, and redemption in the Thirteen Lands.
