'Blackbird' by Michael Fiegel

"You spend enough time with someone and your molecules blend."

Michael Fiegel is a writer and designer whose Internet cult classic, Ninja Burger, has given birth to a series of books and games. Blackbird is his debut novel, a novel he has been writing since 1999.

This book hooked me with the blurb. Either Fiegel needs to pat himself on the back or give his publicist a good handshake because the book's blurb alone will sell copies. The dual first-person narrative follows Edison North, a professional mass murderer, and Christian, the girl he abducts from a fast food restaurant. Edison's abduction of Christian is an anomaly in his life. A random out of place act of maybe kindness, or a response to the potential he sees in her, or maybe a response to his own narcissism; he sees himself in her. What follows is a curiously toxic relationship between a man whose job it is to create chaos in the world (through killing many people at a time) and the young girl he can't quite bring himself to love.

The book begins well. I was intrigued by the character of Edison and keen to see how Fiegel would avoid the trap of creating yet another Dexter-like anti-hero. He does it well. Edison North is no Dexter. The relationship between Edison and Christian and its fluctuations between fear and contempt to love and then hate is done well and is complex enough for the reader to never really know how they feel about each other yet still wish them both well. There's a true sense of a parasitic relationship except you're never quite sure who is the host and who is the parasite.

Then he lost me.

I guess it's meant to read like an action movie. Graphic torture scenes, high-speed getaways, shootouts, the lot. But tension doesn't quite work the same in books as it does in movies. I love a good cliffhanger as much as the next guy but I lost count of the number of scenes that ended with a gun going off and the potential death of a key character hanging in the air only to turn the page and find I'd been tricked once again. Needless to say, by the third time, I stopped being tricked. It was overkill—pun intended. And by page 100, maybe before, I began to wonder if we had lost sight of the story we had begun with. It became a loop of rescues and attempted murders spliced with enough government conspiracies to have us all wrapping our houses in tinfoil. Some books benefit from a 20 year gestation period. I'm not sure this one did.

I don’t know what I would class this as. Not quite crime, definitely not a thriller, perhaps Noir or Domestic Noir? What worked in the first third of the book was that the chaos of the world, wars, terrorist attacks, mass shootings, all of which as supposedly orchestrated by the network of homegrown, possible government-run killers Edison belongs to, was backdrop to the story of a tortured man and the young girl he "saved." As the story develops, the timeline gains ground with real-time and possibly the thought a corrupt government began to feel a little too close to home, Fiegel loses sight of the developing relationship and focuses more on the external. I don’t care about the external. You made me care about Edison and Christian and now I’m losing sympathy for them, too.

You had me at the premise, lost me in the middle, and dragged me across the final pages.

It's great for indulging your inner conspiracy theorist but it could have probably benefited from being at least 100 pages shorter.