In which Brooklyn is very, very haunted

[bloodygranuaile]

Due largely to fighting off being sick, I had enough spare time this past week to actually read a book that's not for a book club. Unheard-of, I know. I need to figure out a way to do this without being sick.

Anyway, I took the time to get hooked on Babylon Berlin (the Netflix show, not the book) and to read Daniel José Older's Midnight Taxi Tango, the second book in the Bone Street Rumba series, which as usual I purchased ages ago with the intention of reading it immediately and then failed.

This book was published two frickin' years ago, and it's the sequel to Half-Resurrection Blues, which I loved, and it's got a big old picture of Kia with a machete on the front cover, so I knew I was going to like it, because Kia is great, and then... *gestures vaguely at entire life*

Anyway. It's been a while since I read Half-Resurrection Blues, but Midnight Taxi Tango contains enough brief summings-up to jog the old memory, so I appreciated that. This book has an entirely different main plot but it does revolve significantly around Sasha, Carlos' love interest who walked out on him at the end of the last book while pregnant, and Carlos' general inability to healthily process his feelings about all of that. But mostly the plot is about a creepy-ass cult of murderous cockroach-covered humanoids who are murdering people both on their own and through the use of the ghosts of small children, who have been somehow programmed into becoming tiny little spectral murderbots. I suspect Older first brainstormed this plot by just going "What are the creepiest, grossest, most unsettling tropes in the entire history of horror stories? One... creepy dead children... two... giant fuckoff swarms of bugs... um... underground murder tunnels, that's a thing, right?"

It could have ended up a bit tryhard and sloppy, but it doesn't, although it certainly doesn't fuck around; the book is loudly and viscerally disturbing from page... *checks* 4, which is actually the second page of original text. The roaches and child ghosts and murder tunnels all resolve into one new and terrifying supernatural threat that is eminently threatening and not quite like anything I've read before. The body counts are high, the combat scenes brutal, the dialogue sharp and funny and expletive-filled in the fine tradition of New York noir.

The viewpoint characters in this book are Carlos, the partially-resurrected private contractor for the New York Council of the Dead with no memory of his prior life; Reza, a dapper hit woman who's part of a gang that decides to get revenge on all its shady associates; and Kia, the sixteen-year-old niece of Carlos' friend Baba Eddie, who picks up the ability to see ghosts after getting attacked by one of the little weaponized dead toddlers and who is not very good at capoeira. Kia is the best. She is sometimes impulsive because sixteen-year-olds are not traditionally known for their impulse control, but more often than not she's still reining in Carlos, because Carlos is Noir Protagonist Man and therefore stabby and emotionally illiterate. Kia is stabby too, but generally smarter. She also has unresolved issues with her favorite cousin disappearing on her several years ago after witnessing some creepy supernatural shit at some dude's house, which obviously turns out to be highly relevant to our plot. Kia is really into King Impervious, who if I recall correctly is Izzy from Shadowshaper. (There's also a brief cameo by Sierra's dragon mural, and now I want crossover fanfic/short stories where Kia meets all the Shadowshaper girls and they hang out and kick supernatural ass together.) Kia avoids the "sassy black girl" stereotype by having too much character depth and genuine awesomeness to be a stereotype and by being a central character instead of someone's best friend; no reduction in sassing people required.

As an avid fan of secondary characters I am also pleased to report that the secondary characters are a ton of fun. Most of them are ghosts, but there's also a gay Brazilian capoeira instructor, the rest of Reza's combination taxi service/prostitution ring/murder gang, some creepy white people involved with the roach cult, a boss dope-smoking librarian called Dr. Tennessee, and the amusingly infuriating Council of fussy dead bureaucrats. Some are new; some are reappearances from earlier books, like the ghost Mama Esther, and Baba Eddie and his boyfriend Russell. Kia's best friend, Karina, babysits a bunch of white toddlers and is apparently training them to be Jamaican revolutionaries, which turns up in only one scene but it is solid gold.

This book also features several trips out to Long Island, which really made me aware of how bad my Long Island geography is. Like, I too went on a trip to Long Island, last weekend, and I have no idea where the fuck anything is! I recognized a couple place-names as place-names that are vaguely related to my family, in that I know I have family members that have been associated with those places, possibly recently (my entire maternal side of the family lives on Long Island except for my mom and one uncle), but I have no mental map of the place. I have no mental map of Brooklyn, either, just a memory of Grandma Rossi's apartment; I couldn't tell you what neighborhood it was in to save my soul. Great-Grandpa Martin lived in Flatbush. I have no idea where in Brooklyn my mother was born. I am now oddly motivated to go study a map of Long Island. But anyway, the point is that this book takes place in all the highly specific neighborhoods of New York, not just the shiny playground-for-the-rich bits that get featured on TV, with absurdly large apartments and no travel time between scenes.

Anyway, that was a major digression. I told you I was sick! If I stay sick for another week I might have to track down a copy of Battle Hill Bolero, preferably without leaving the house.