Fiction Book Blog

Do you like film noir films? How about the movie Constantine?  Did you
enjoy watching Agents Scully and Mulder solve their strange cases?  If you
answered yes to more than one of these questions, I highly recommend reading Something
from the Nightside by Simon Green.  This book is a grand collision of
sci-fi and P.I., and the result is something you’ve never seen before.

The novel’s main character is John Taylor, a private investigator with a gift
for finding things (’whether they want to be found or not’).  He lives in
his shabby office in London, doing whatever cases happen to come his way.
Then, a woman comes and offers Taylor quite a lot money to find her missing
daughter. The only catch, the mother has heard rumors that her daughter is
in someplace called the Nightside, and was also told Taylor was the man to hire
if something needed found there. Simon Green gives the best explanation of the
Nightside on the back of the books cover:

“The Nightside. That square mile of Hell in the middle of the city
where it’s always three A.M.  Where you can walk beside myths and
monsters.  Where nothing is as it seems and everything is possible.”

Taylor has sworn never to go back to the Nightside, but the money is just too
good it seems.  So Taylor returns to his birthplace, a place where his
good, or bad (depending on how you look at it) reputation almost always precedes
him, and his many enemies are always looking for him.  Throughout the
story we meet several strange, scary, and just plain weird people and
creatures, including a house that eats people and Razor Eddie: Punk God Straight Razors.

The novel has quite a few clichés, but it takes them to a whole new level
simply by throwing in the complexity of the Nightside and its general
weirdness.  This book is the first in an eight-book series, and it seems
its main purpose is to establish the general setting and tone of the
novel.  It also introduces us to the main characters, my personal favorite
being trigger-happy Shotgun Suzie, a.k.a. Suzie Shooter, a.k.a. Oh, Christ it’s
her, run! 

Despite its predictability and the fact that Green is constantly repeating
himself, the book is in fact a good fluff read.  I easily finished it in a
day, and had time to start on the second one. It’s definitely not too deep or
challenging, but it will keep you entertained. I would give it 6 1/2 out of ten
stars.   I will be reviewing one of the Nightside novels every week, so
watch for next weeks, Agents of Light and Darkness!