by S.P. Somtow
1999 Harper
Thai-American journalist Stephen Lelliott works on a story about the Thai sex industry, focusing on a young prostitute Dao and her two brothers. Dao is killed by budding serial killer, Embassy nebbish Dirk Temple, followed soon afterwards by Stephen, who rises with the power of the Crow to flip around and get vengeance.
The first half is very slow and hampered by a glaring plot point. Dao's virginity is up for auction, and Stephen gets some cash from his producers to win the auction, with the view of following her from Thailand to her new life in America. But he's not buying out her contract, a fact which everyone seems to be aware. If the plan was to sneak her away from her pimp, he didn't need to pay for her virginity. As it is, he pays the money for nothing while they both act as if the act would free her. Things like this wouldn't bother me when we're dealing with crows bringing people back to life, but this was the only thing going on for the first half of the novel.
Also distracting was Stephen's death, dished out by a child gang shooting him with super soakers loaded with acid so strong it melted him down to the bone and burned a hole through the floor. Things finally start becoming horrific, in the 90s serial killer style of little actual violence, just the aftermath of it in the way of gruesomely displayed bodies. Eyeballs scooped out with spoons, children shoved back in the womb, crucifixions, intestines lining the walls like plumbing, the works.
Stephen comes back as a Crow and takes vengeance on Dirk while protecting his grandmother and Dao's surviving brother from limo chamfered AK-47 wielding goons. This leads to underground sex shows of the social and political elite, who are ripped to shreds by giant murders of crows. Goes so over the top it ends with kaiju size manifestations of cosmic figures fighting over the city.
I'm finally getting into the headspace for the Crow once I figured out how to balance the self-seriousness and the silliness. This one had too little Crow and too much milling around, but it pulled it off by the end. I was expecting Somtow to be more poetic and/or pretentious, but this came out like fairly standard 90s fair.
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