Blood Standard, Laird Barron
3.0 Stars
12-20-2024

Apparently I have no idea what I want. I thought a gritty and hard-bitten Laird Barron crime-detective-adventure story would be right up my alley, but in practice not so much. Part of the problem rests with me; I haven't really read many of these stories, and while in theory I thought I would like them, when the narrative actually starts unspooling I'm a bit put off by it. It's just not really a fantasy that I'm enamored with, in fact the opposite. Have none of these people heard of index funds? Why are you getting into fist fights and murdering people rather than checking out new board game designs on Table Top Simulator? It's just this entire way of life and mind set and fantasy that is not super-attractive, especially to me, with my bird-thin programmer bones. Part of the problem though rests with Laird, in that his criming narratives don't really make much sense. E.g. the book starts off with mobsters in Alaska, and I'm just not sure that Alaska can support that many mobsters. Like you have 4 small icy towns with a total population of ~5000, that is not enough territory to support a half-dozen Italians in suits. Some local families that maybe smuggle cigarretes or grow pot or whatever? Sure! But there's only so much organized crime that can really go on in a collection of scattered outposts. Similarly, when the narrative moves to the East Coast, the story is set in a sort of Miller's Crossing world of feuding Italian families and rules of honor, rather than in the actual present day of what, Serbians? Albanians? Russians? Cartels? It just doesn't come off as realistic. Laird Barron doesn't really have this issue with his Cosmic horror stories; if his tales of space leeches and dead worlds aren't accurate, there's no one there to gainsay him. Moving closer to the real world though, I think he could benefit from doing some research for his novels. Related quibbles: A) the NSA does not do field work, they do not have teams of assassins or networks of informants B) FBI partners or police partners do not disagree in front of interview subjects, except *maybe* as part of some ploy. (or at least that's what Rivers of London has told me, and that seems like something that would be true) C) you do generally get arrested if you kill a score of people over the course of 2 weeks, even if there is some corruption in the local PD. There's just no way this doesn't attract all sorts of attention.

So, what is good here? I like Laird's writing, even if the actual content doesn't always make sense. He's skilled at the basic profession. I liked the mild tie-ins to his horror universe, which enliven an otherwise kind of pointless tale. I like that he gifts the MC not necessarily with extreme smarts or deadly skill, but with ~350 lbs of mass and a quasi-supernatural ability to take a beating/stabbing/shooting and still recover from it. I like that the inflection point for the MC and other Laird characters isn't a murder or a bag of money or a dame in distress, but rather cruelty/murder of animals. Going back and mildly spoiling an earlier Laird short story, in the short story the MC is a big game hunter/poacher, and over his life he's shot countless hundreds of buffalo/elephants/etc. And he's with a group of gentleman hunters in the deep woods and they're all contending with a giant satanic moose. Trust me, it's scarier than it sounds. And the MC in this story is worried that the moose will get him, but eventually he gets reassured by the moose that really, there's nothing for the MC to worry about, since the MC has belonged to the moose and his buddies since way back, so there's no need to chomp on him now. With Blood Standard, Laird takes the opposite tack, and it's the MC's violent refusal to go along with a hunting expedition that's the trigger for his modest moral improvement, and causes the MC's path to diverge from the standard doomed/damned Laird Barron MC. So, an argument for Jainism? Or at least veganism. In any case, I liked that it predicates the story on deeper ideology? metaphysics? the basis elements of the Laird Barron universe? rather than on more standard mob/crime/detective concerns. It has a little of the flavor of Tim Powers in its Dashiell Hammett.