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Apr. 3rd, 2013 06:19 pmI've been instructed that I should read John Ford's The Dragon Waiting, but before I got around to that I found myself in possession of a copy of Ford's The Last Hot Time, courtesy of ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija.
The Last Hot Time is a really fascinating, really cool book in a lot of ways. It's old-school urban fantasy - elves, cold city lights, and a distinctly noir feel - and set in a kind of strange post-fantasy-apocalyptic Chicago, with the Field Museum and old movie theaters and a gangster history that everyone remembers with faint nostalgia and a thriving black market in addictive elf blood. (Addictive elf blood. Yes.) It's also I guess maybe related to something called the Borderlands universe which I know absolutely nothing about, although I'm happy to be enlightened!
Anyway, I have been kind of bored of elves for a long time now, but what I like about this is that while there are elves in it, it's not really about the elves at all; it's more about the mix of (fascinating, diverse, troubled) human characters that move through the city, and have their lives affected by it. The protagonist is a very sweet young paramedic from a a small Iowa town who gets sort of accidentally picked up to do an emergency medical job by the mysterious Mr. Patrise one afternoon, and the more he gets involved the more he comes to learn about himself and the city and the rest of the people in it. The protagonist is low-key and interested and generally willing to go with the flow, and the reader's picking up the rich tidbits of dropped information and putting things together as much as he is, all of which makes it a consistently fascinating read. (If occasionally very much of its time. There are tons of characters of color, but the female characters, while interesting, emphatically do not get as much to do as the male characters, and when they do they usually don't succeed in it; also there is some unfortunate casual yellowface at a Halloween party.)
But. But ( major spoilers ahead )
rachelmanija.The Last Hot Time is a really fascinating, really cool book in a lot of ways. It's old-school urban fantasy - elves, cold city lights, and a distinctly noir feel - and set in a kind of strange post-fantasy-apocalyptic Chicago, with the Field Museum and old movie theaters and a gangster history that everyone remembers with faint nostalgia and a thriving black market in addictive elf blood. (Addictive elf blood. Yes.) It's also I guess maybe related to something called the Borderlands universe which I know absolutely nothing about, although I'm happy to be enlightened!
Anyway, I have been kind of bored of elves for a long time now, but what I like about this is that while there are elves in it, it's not really about the elves at all; it's more about the mix of (fascinating, diverse, troubled) human characters that move through the city, and have their lives affected by it. The protagonist is a very sweet young paramedic from a a small Iowa town who gets sort of accidentally picked up to do an emergency medical job by the mysterious Mr. Patrise one afternoon, and the more he gets involved the more he comes to learn about himself and the city and the rest of the people in it. The protagonist is low-key and interested and generally willing to go with the flow, and the reader's picking up the rich tidbits of dropped information and putting things together as much as he is, all of which makes it a consistently fascinating read. (If occasionally very much of its time. There are tons of characters of color, but the female characters, while interesting, emphatically do not get as much to do as the male characters, and when they do they usually don't succeed in it; also there is some unfortunate casual yellowface at a Halloween party.)
But. But ( major spoilers ahead )
