Something More Than Night by Kim Newman
Mr. Newman’s latest does for Noir what he did for Vampires.
In LA in the late thirties, Raymond Chandler is writing mysteries. Billy Pratt is making Frankenstein movies under the name Boris Karloff. Then, as now, LA was full of monsters, and Raymond and Billy have killed a couple of them in their day.
Their friend Joh Devlin is an investigator for the DA’s office. He is called in on a strange case at the second rate and deeply weird Pyramid Studios. Several people are dead, and something very strange is afoot in the basement. But the owners have a lot of pull, so Devlin is ordered off the case, and then fired.
Raymond, Billy, and Joh have to investigate, and bring the guilty to justice.
They are sucked into a nightmare of violence, mad science, and supernatural evil.
OK, clearly this is the Noir version of Frankenstein. What else would you expect from Newman??
As Raymond observes, in all the different versions and remakes of Frankenstein, the one thing that is constant is the lesson: you should not create the monster in the first place. People never seem to learn.
This is Kim Newman, so you know that Raymond and Billy will encounter numerous people you’ve heard of, real and fictional. They also have to deal with the weird evil of Hollywood and LA—power, corruption, vice, and absolutely grotesque violence. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sick.
- Kim Newman, Something More Than Night, London, Titan, 2021.
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