Without wishing it to sound anything like routine: another extraordinary novel from James Sallis.
This one, like many of his others, is hard to pin down exactly. Paranormal, science-fiction and metaphysical elements vie within a crime story a la Savage Night, about a hitman on his last job. Perhaps that catch-all label ‘slipstream’ will have to cover it.
It is not a conventional crime novel by any means, but then you wouldn’t expect convention from Sallis. The horrors are to be read, in part, in the voice: disconnected, spare, skittish, lambent, haunted. In part they’re there in the portrait of an alternative present or a credible near-future: a world where America has a black woman president, where acts of terrorism are common and the weather weirdly erratic.
The sensationalism of the tabloids further degrades society. Kirsty is low on the journalism food chain and must write what fits her newspaper’s slant: “Her job is to find fifteen hundred words of the sort of Sunday feature that makes readers feel better about their own lives…No town where a killer is on the loose is allowed to be a nice town; it’s an unwritten law.” Later in the novel, when a serial killer is caught, the media whips the public into such a frenzy that a mob pursues his common-law wife after she visits him in jail.
The author of Seduction of the Innocent talks about his novel, his relationship with comics, the possibilities of the comic medium, his thoughts on the 100 Bullets series, his first exposure to comics, and lots more.