Review of Banshees (Mike Baron novel)

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 07-04-2017 21:07:28

When I first heard Mike Baron was seguing from writing mostly comic books
to writing novels, I'll admit I was a little nervous. I knew he had a somewhat
unique creative style in that he often wrote not only the comic script, but
pictographs roughing out the actual panels of the entire book.

When you are used to telling a lot of your story with pictures, how will that
transfer when you are suddenly forced to paint all the pictures with words alone?
I hold a deep, sad nostalgia for the finest years of Nexus, and you just don't
expect quality like that to come around again.

To say Baron still has game is an
understatement - he's at the top of his game, and has expanded the toolset.
He's wittier than ever, the vocabulary is bigger than ever, and he can still
create those moods that are creepy, gripping, and funny all at the same time.
He replaced the unreplaceable Dude with metaphors that make me wonder how
the hell does anybody come up with shit this clever? It's like a great
songwriter, how do they do it?

When Baron is at his best he effortlessly crafts plausible implausibilities.
This is the fun stuff, why we read novels, when it's clear we are in a
fantasy world but it feels real enough. Banshees takes chunks of some of
my favorite styles and genres, and melds it all together. It's part Coen
Brothers, part Sam Raimi, part Tarantino, all dropped into a Sex Pistols
12 Days On The Road setting. The Banshees rise from the dead, play in
Europe, land in the states for a tour and weave an odd path to the west
coast where things get nuts and unravel.

The book flows too easily. Tons of short chapters, each telling a mini-story.
It gets compelling quick while playing fast and loose as you go. Mike never
misses a chance to pay homage to friends, his past, and his pop culture
preferences, name dropping people he's worked with and little-known gem
musical acts like the Foreign Films. I love this stuff in movies - what
posters do they have on the wall, what song is playing in the background?
Cool choices here make a ton of difference, and Mike is always slipping
this stuff in.

What a fun read - you can't go wrong with sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.

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