Reviewed by Chris Deal
The New Black
There’s a lot of discussion going on these days in regards to what it means to be noir, whether the genre requires all the old tropes, the hard-boiled, anti-hero private detective, the femme fatale, organized crime or corrupt law. Since the heyday of the ’40s and ’50s, it’s been common to see directors and writers play with the set up of noir, to twist the conventions around until they are unrecognizable, until it comes down to the fact that we really don’t know what they were in the first place.
In a recent article, Otto Penzler aimed to cut down the debate with a simple thesis: forget the private eye, noir is about the losers, the dregs, the failures, the users, simply put: the worst of us. Noir is, according to Penzler, about the lost and the corrupt, those doomed from the very first word of the story.
Which brings me to the debut by Richard Thomas, Transubstantiate. Thomas has openly described his work as “neo-noir” and several weeks after I read it, I think I’ve finally figured out what that means. Of the seven perspectives the story is told through, even if they don’t want to admit it to themselves, even if they are blind to the fact, each character is lost.
The main focus of things is the small town of Libertyville, where we see some of these characters going about their lives. Jacob opens up his dusty bookstore and waits for one or two customers to come in while silently plotting how to get out while looking through the lens of his telescope at the ocean. Marcy is an upper-management bureaucrat who keeps an eye on the town, sleeping with X while ignoring her son. Jimmy runs through the broken streets, searching for food and supplies while hiding his lover, Madison, in the sewer to keep her safe from the cannibalistic gangs roaming the surface. Gordon is hiding in plain sight, sneaking back into Libertyville after his exile, a new face and new gifts but the same old sociopath. X and Assigned are above it all, watching and manipulating things to their own ends.
Thomas does not shy away, and in the true noir convention, there is blood, sex, and despair brimming through this novel, but at the same time, he subverts what we’ve come to expect, showing more of the neo than the noir. He knows what came before, but his story isn’t confined to just one genre, in fact there are plenty of other touchstones he lovingly caresses in prose atom-sharp, moments where he hits science fiction and horror as well as good old-fashioned Cold War paranoia.
Considering the debate over what is or is not noir or hardboiled is moot when it comes to Transubstantiate. Thomas has many clear influences, a little bit of King, a dash of Clevenger, but like any maestro in the kitchen, he takes the ingredients that you’ve had and loved time after time, but brings them together in a concoction so new and wonderful, it not only gives you a new perspective on what you’ve had before, but makes you antsy for the tastes to come.
