So, Blackbirds. I’m a bit late to the party on this one, but better late than never. It’s the first in Chuck Wendig’s Miriam Black series, walking alongside a woman who, on skin contact, will see how someone is going to die. Black is smart, but as sharp and cutting as strong acid. She’s hurt, and willing to let her life tailspin until, well, it doesn’t. In the meantime, she moves between jobs, between towns, between dead people, just keeping the wolf from the door, and trying not to think too hard. The universe, of course, has other plans.
This story feels, in a lot of ways, like a contemporary thriller. Miriam Black is on the run in an America we can all recognise from television. Maybe not one we’d especially like to visit though. Cookie-cutter suiburbanism is elsewhere. These are the cockroach riddled motel rooms, the truck stop bathrooms, the silent depths of the US experience, writ large on its public consciousness. There’s something weirdly private about it too - Miriam navigates her mental geograpy as much as the physical, but both are more and less than they seem on the surface, and both have absolutely no shortage of nasty surprises. This is a space of movement, of transience, where nobody stays for long, and nobody wants to, skipping from town to town in beat up junkers or hitching a ride in a long haul truck cab while trying not to do a line of coke off the dashboard. It’s a sparse, grim place, and I’ll give Wendig credit, he evokes it with a lean, tight prose that makes you feel like you’re there, filling in the gaps between the words with, usually, something worse. It’s also a world filled with abrupt and occasionally lurid violence. Shootings, torture, bladed weapons, and some truly brutal, intimate hand to hand fighting. It’s all here, and approached in an unflinching way which, if I’m honest, didn’t sit well with me. It felt a little too much for its own sake. That said, I also know it works for a lot of people, and as a style and mood choice it fits perfectly with the story presented, so I can’t get too upset. But, you know, go in with a gore warning in front of you, and maybe take some goggles and a plastic apron, just in case.
Speaking of the unpleasant, well, Miriam Black is not a good time protagonist. She’s smart, obviously, but miserable, seemingly getting by on not much more than coffee and attitude. Her expectations are relentlessly low, and her miserableness, her sharp edges, and her low opinion of everyone else are saturated through every line of the story. Miriam is not a nice person, and she makes a lot of bad choices because she doesn’t believe she deserves better ones. As the narrative expands, some of the forces behind her current situation become less occluded, and who she is and why she is that way make more sense. But it’s a hard read, a dive into sorrow and depression and violence. As a character, Miriam Black is wonderfully drawn, and entirely believable, but sharing her perspective is an experience that it took me several coffees to come to terms with. The same is true of most of the cast, to be honest, though we see most of them from a little further away than Miriam’s head. They’re almost all awful in some way or another, almost all people you’d gladly push down a mineshaft, but for all that, they’re perfectly plausible as people, terrible as they may be . A few rays of light here and there mean things aren’t quite as dark as all that, but still. Again, be ready for that sort of mood-lowerer going in.
Having said that, the story itself is a good time. It rattles along with enthusiasm, giving us interludes in Miriam’s past, slowly building her up and out from our first impression, putting in details and shifts that change our perspective even as we walk alongside her. There’s a lot going on in this one, to be fair. Murders. Drugs. Chases across country. Interrogations. Surreal antagonists. Romance, and well, not-romance. Gunfights and aftermaths. It’s a story filled with emotional moments, stitched together by violence and loss. Did I always want to keep reading? No. But did I always turn the page anyway to see what happened next? Yes.
I’m not sure how I feel about this, in the end. If you’re in the mood for a violent supernatural thriller that’s also a slice of Americana gone bad, you’ll love it, that’s for sure - this one’s for you.
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