The Blue Blazes by Chuck Wendig

Mass Market Paperback/eBook
May 2013, 400 Pages
ISBN 978-0-857-663-351-8
http://terribleminds.com/ramble/port…e-blue-blazes/
Review copy e-ARC courtesy of the publisher/NetGalley

Mookie Pearl is hired muscle for The Organization, the Polish mafia in the NY/NJ tri-state area. Not only does he deal in death, and does what needs doing on a regular basis, he also partakes in the supernatural underbelly of New York City. This underbelly is populated by gobbos (goblins), undead, and other assorted creatures out of nightmare, role-playing games, and world myth.
Mookie is at the stage in his career in the Organization that he’s gained enough trust and loyalty with the Boss that he can come and go as he pleases and run his side of the Organization as he sees fit. The problem is two-fold – the Boss is on his last legs and a young woman named Persephone is causing a great deal of havoc for the Organization and the Underworld in general. What few people know, actually nobody outside of Mookie’s closest ‘friend’ Werth, is that Persephone is actually Mookie’s daughter Eleanor “Nora” Pearl. As events unfold, The Boss appoints his grandson the heir of the Organization, new ‘partners’ are brought into the fold of the Organization, the Boss’s health takes some strange turns; Mookie is increasingly put in the middle of his loyalty to the Organization and his yearning to make things better with his estranged daughter Nora.

It’s a familiar tale, superficially. Daddy ignores daughter and wife for work, daughter rebels. Wendig provides points-of-view from Mookie and Nora, as well as Mookie’s friend Werth, Nora’s friend Skelly, and the primary antagonist of the novel Candlefly, one of the Boss’s new associates. The title of the novel is derived from the Cerulean powder characters rub on their temples opening their vision to the world of the paranormal and conferring enhanced strength/metabolism. The Blue Blazes is just one of the Occulted Pigments of power in the novel, Mookie comes across the Golden Gate (Ochre) and the Red Rage (Vermillion), but what he needs most is simply the Violet Void, also known as the Dead Head. The Violet is only a myth in this world, mainly because of its miraculous restorative powers, which Mookie hopes will heal the Boss. So, intertwined with this emotional family drama is a quest and descent to the underworld, rather The Underworld.

What could be a simple novel takes on an air of gravitas because of Wendig’s subtle yet powerful writing. Giving these totems, places, and people titles like The Underworld, The Boss, and The Organization, Wendig lends them a resonance that gives the story great, almost mythic power. This is further enhanced by the “journal clippings” prefacing each chapter, the journal of a lost, possibly insane and possibly fictitious, cartographer of The Great Below, John Atticus Oakes. Such chapter prefaces often work very well for my reading sensibilities and the fact that I found a resonance of sorts with what Chuck Wendig did here to what Mathew Stover (a favorite writer of mine) did in Blade of Tyshalle only heightened my enjoyment because Wendig did just as an effective job with these lost journal fragments.

Despite the violence and monstrous stakes, Wendig manages to keep a lot of intimacy intact. One of the things Mookie loves, aside from his daughter and The Organization, is eating. Mookie cooks, he has a personal butcher and the food he eats (gwumpki, pierogies) are foods I grew up eating, so I found a level of kinship with Mookie, even if my only other similarity (frankly, I’m not as old as him, not as hulking, nor do I have an estranged daughter) is living in the same NY/NJ corner of the US as does Mookie.

It may be reductive to do the whole combine-and-compare thing, but think one part Hellboy, one part Mathew Stover, one part Big Trouble in Little China, and throw in a dash of The Sopranos, the film The Wrestlerand pulp sensibilities, and you might have an idea of what a great stew of fun this novel really is. Although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Mookie is a killer on the same level of Richard “The Iceman” Kuklinski, there’s a similar dichotomy and divide between the family life and the “work life” of the two men. What’s even better is that Wendig seems to only given readers a peek into the world Mookie and his daughter Nora inhabit.

The Blue Blazes is novel/story with a rough, hewn-leather exterior of action and violence with a powerful, emotional core. Emotions that intertwine like love and hate, and emotions that fuel and underlie the motives and actions like regret, sorrow, and fear, and ultimately inform a man with powerful exterior who uses that exterior to often hide his fears and regrets. I found myself not wanting to move on with whatever my daily life required while I was reading The Blue Blazes, work, family activities, etc. The great power of this novel is that I feel like I have to read more of Chuck Wendig’s fiction.

A note on the cover The Blue Blazes, in one word: AMAZING. Not only is Joey HiFi’s image minimally colored and powerful because that fact, the image itself seems to capture so many of the moments in the novel itself. Perfection in a book cover.

In the end, The Blue Blazes is a blast, an awesome, smartly written novel that far exceeds the sum of its parts and transcends those things with which it is similar to be an excellent novel on its own merits. Sure to end up on my favorite reads list at the end of this year.

Highly Recommended