Alien Blues by Lynn S. Hightower
While on the case of a psychopathic serial killer, detective David Silver and his partner Mel uncover that “Machete Man” is just the beginning of a larger and far more dangerous conspiracy. Can they uncover the haunting secrets of this puzzle, and if so, at what cost?
Oh, and there are aliens that smell like limes, apparently.
I feel like it was reasonable to expect some sort of campiness in Alien Blues.
**Trigger warning for rape, sadism, and derision of intersex folks/gender non-conforming folks**
I wasn’t twenty pages in before I was treated to tales of how Machete Man dismembers and then masturbates onto his victims.
Cooooool.
These depictions aren’t prolonged or overly detailed, but it’s the principle of the matter here. Nothing about the packaging of this book says “contains multiple sadists.”
About the same time, I was rolling my eyes about the needless sexualized violence of the villain, I struggled with an entirely different problem: the writing itself. At best I would describe it as stilted.
I’m too lazy to track down an exact passage, but it read like such: “The ground was cracked. Through the cracked ground was a path. That path was made of paving bricks. The paving bricks were in a zig-zag pattern. […]”
Then, whenever the simple “the X was” sentences became too repetitious, they’d lop off the subject and the verb.
“There was a metal table. There was a pitcher of water on top. Glasses of lemonade. Plates with potato salad.”
Not only are these sentences so boring, but the information contained within them also isn’t valuable. The lemonade never matters again. I’m guessing those sentences are to showcase Detective David Silver’s attention to detail and analytical eye, but all it made me think was that he should focus. A woman was almost just hatcheted to death. The pattern of the path in the garden does not matter.
Speaking of David Silver, he’s generic and good-natured; impossible to hate but almost as impossible to love. He loves his daughters and his wife. He tries to be honest and upright and his only personality comes from being raised in a bad neighborhood by a seemingly abusive mother.
This mother doesn’t matter, except to give David Silver some meaning as a stand-alone character. The only thing that matters is the plot which, at least initially, feels formulaic; there are clear questions posed at regular intervals to keep you turning the pages even if you aren’t particularly invested in any specific part of the story.
It all bothered me so much, and yet …
Once, several years ago, there was a guy on my morning commute who always read a Lee Child book. He’d go through several a month, and after a few months, I grew curious. Armed with a little research about the best Lee Child novels, I grabbed Persuader, book #7 of the Jack Reacher series, and gave it a read.
It had needlessly sexualized violence, whole 17 sentence paragraphs of sentences like “The ground was cracked,” and a good-natured but bland protagonist constantly answering and unearthing bite-sized questions in such a perfect way that I read Persuader is short order despite not liking it at all.
Persuader has 61.5k ratings on Goodreads and a 4.1-star average.
Now let it be known that I think those people are wrong. I could go into more specific detail about why Persuader isn’t good, the most glaring being that the main character, Reacher, is supposedly this brilliant ex-military-police officer gone undercover and he misses the “twist” in the novel so hard I legitimately thought it was just a plot hole. I’m a 30-something middle-class lady with no experience with anything even marginally sordid. If I can clock that the mob boss just did something really weird and hard to explain in, like, chapter 5, then the guy who was military police definitely should…
But still. If police procedurals have a certain style of writing, even if it’s not very good, who am I to judge an author for adhering to it?
With this in mind, I was prepared to give Alien Blues a pass. And then things started to fall apart.
While David Silver was tracking Machete Man and questions were being posed and answered in perfect time so that there were always two to three great easily summarized questions I wanted to know the answer to, I was happy to keep reading.
The hardest thing about writing a formulaic* plot-driven book, it seems, is that the second the plot loses you, there’s no good reason to keep reading.
And eventually, the plot lost me. Clear questions were replaced with a murkiness that was hard to be too curious about. We went from “What’s driving Machete Man?” to “What’s going on?” and that’s just not good enough.
This vagueness lasted until the end of the book. Like, the villain is made clear, but the specifics about their villainy is abstract and confusing. And, perhaps most critically, there’s never an ‘Ahha!’ moment, which I feel is critical for a detective, investigative type book.
I have other concerns: the world-building is inventive but lacks cohesion. Essentially, it felt like the author thought up a few neat ideas and then simply stuck them on top of the world as it was in 1992. This leads to a world where landlines are the only way to communicate, but automobiles have sophisticated AI that can report on holes in the windshield or issues with the exhaust.
Dialogue is poorly tagged. About 30% of the time I had no idea who was talking. I eventually just gave up re-reading to try to figure it out from context.
There’s definitely a “magical/wise black lady” who pops up in a role that makes no sense (How is a mob boss also, like, a super-nice lady who does nothing wrong?) and feels like she walked right out of a book on tropes.
Characters die for no good reason in ways that do nothing to affect the plot. Some of them I felt were for convenience; the narrative was easier without them there. Others I think were to tug on the heartstrings.
Oh, and, spoiler, the ultimate villain of the piece is an intersex character who is also a sexual predator and sadist.
If there were some plot-related reason that this villain was intersex, I’d still hate it, but it’d feel less gratuitous. Instead, there’s just no good reason paired with shitty jokes and commentary about the villain’s gender identity.
Also, when this sexual predator accosts David Silver, it is highly sexualized. David Silver even finds it slightly titillating which is absolutely bizarre. He’s underground in a very dangerous neighborhood, effectively kidnapped by a known murderer, and up until this point has been legitimately terrified. Suddenly the villain beats him up and kisses him and … that lights him up?
There is just so much that is not okay.
I did finish the book. This is in part because I was in so deep when shit started to fall apart that I knew curiosity would eat away at me if I didn’t finish Alien Blues.
Also, I loved the aliens.
What I had been hoping for in Alien Blues was a buddy-cop sort of novel, and after reading it I want that more than ever. The Elaki of Alien Blues, the giant stingray-looking guys, are not only the best part of the novel, they’re a great depiction of aliens, period.
First off, when they want to slur humans, they call them “hot dogs,” which is hilarious and brilliant. They love the old-school naming convention where you are named after what you do—a la Fletcher, Smith, Cooper, etc—so much that they give themselves names based on their interests/proficiencies. This leads to characters being referred to, in all seriousness, as “String” or “Grammar” or “Puzzle.”
They hate spicy food but flock to taco stands that serve up the blandest tacos imaginable while happily declaring it “authentic.”
And, perhaps my favorite, is the way they speak. It perfectly smacks of someone who speaks English as a second (or third, or fourth) language. My favorite line of the book is a very annoyed Elaki saying “Must you be interruptious?”
There are some buddy-cop-like moments in Alien Blues, and I savored each one I came across. Unfortunately, all the other shittiness of the novel aside, they were too few and they didn’t dig in deep enough. I would have devoured a book with David Silver paired with a new Elaki partner, watching them go from standoffish to trusting each other, nabbing the (not needlessly intersex) villain, and then, I don’t know, singing karaoke or something together in the epilogue.
Instead, I’m stuck with another book I can’t recommend.
*I realize 7-foot tall stingray aliens aren’t quite formulaic but work with me on this one.
Cover art by Richard Hescox:
