Blackbirds
I’ve never had to hitchhike, myself; I’m boring that way. Lucky, too, because I wouldn’t really enjoy it. No internet, for one, and hair care on the road is a bitch and a half. But there’s a weird sort of romance to it – hitting the road with nothing but your thumb and the contents of your pockets for company. It’s one of the last adventures you can get in modern America, and the fact that it exists on the periphery of civilization (instead of a Floridan swamp, the backwoods of Appalachia, or what have you) has a lot to do with that romance.
Miriam Black, the protagonist of Chuck Wendig’s Blackbirds, is a hitchhiker. She’s a lot of other things, too – a con artist, a thief, potentially an accessory to murder, and, oh, a psychic who can foresee the deaths of human beings. I buried the lede on that, didn’t I? Mr. Wendig doesn’t; Blackbirds starts with a bang, a grody, ugly little death in a grody, ugly little hotel room that sets the tone for the whole book. It’s an urban fantasy that takes place in the greasy, deserted corners of 21st-century America, where cockroaches scuttle across corpses and a dead man’s wallet with fifty bucks and a Mastercard is the wages of a good day’s work.
But let’s go back to the hitchhiker thing for a moment (as the book quickly does); it really is a key thing for Miriam. In a classic fantasy novel, a character like her would be Ye Olde Adventurer; here, she’s the closest thing there is in the modern world. Mr. Wendig made his protagonist a trickster archetype, living by her wits in the wide-open spaces, rubbing elbows with all sorts of interesting scum. Making her look, live and act (mostly) like, in her own words, “grade-A primo road trash” grounds that archetype in the reader’s world, giving us all kinds of assumptions that the book can play around with.
And whoof, does it ever. “Playful” might be a weird word to use for a book so seeded with bleak and brutal happenings, but Blackbirds has a teasing, almost comic tone (mostly drawn from its narrator’s voice) that throws the occasions of violence, death, and crawling terror into stark relief. Essentially, nothing that is happening is really funny, so Miriam makes jokes (to the other characters and, second-hand to the reader) about all of it. It works. Occasionally her venomous cutesiness and truly creative cursing grate a little, or seem out of place, but it’s not particularly problematic.
Anyway. The book. “Miriam Black knows when you will die,” advertises the back cover; if she makes skin-to-skin contact, she will see a vision of your death. In the course of making her living via her unique gift, she encounters a fellow con artist named Ashley (which he is well aware is a girl’s name), a decent-hearted trucker who is poorly repaid for his kindness, and a pair of colorful killers. Every urban fantasy is contractually obliged to have two quirky, interesting, terrifying bad guys, and Mr. Wendig’s pair (Frankie and Harriet) are particularly good examples of all those things. And of course, they have a mysterious employer, whose eventual revelation and identity aren’t quite as good a sell, but that’s just because it’s hard to top Frankie and Harriet.
Of course, Miriam gets caught up in the various machinations of these characters, a tangle of long-term schemes and truly awful spur-of-the-moment decisions that drags her kicking and screaming into adventure. Interspersed throughout the main narrative are three main framing devices. The first, a flashback to Miriam’s interview with a college-age blogger, slowly unfolds her tragic backstory; the second is a series of chapters narrated by various other characters, whether to introduce other plot elements or simply steep the reader in their creepy perspective. The third, perhaps the least immediately effective but most interesting long-term, is Miriam’s series of dreams exploring the nature of her power and possibly even its origin.
Mr. Wendig wields all those narrative tools effectively, keeping the book moving along at a constantly thrilling pace with little more than the occasional pause for breath. There are two real weaknesses to Blackbirds. One of them is something that didn’t occur to me until my second read, which means it’s really not too much of a big deal; Miriam has visions of other peoples’ deaths. Some of those deaths occur far in the future, which means, that even with her limited window, she ought to be getting glimpses of a very different world. However, that’s easy forgivable because “telling the future” isn’t really what Blackbirds is about. It’s a rabbit hole that isn’t worth Mr. Wendig’s time to fall down.
The other issue is Louis, the aforementioned trucker, a decent if damaged human being caught up in Miriam’s latest mess. He comes across as a good guy, with a believable backstory, but compared to the assortment of wretches that populate the pages of Blackbirds he’s just not tremendously interesting. Luckily, Miriam & co. can carry that weight for him (though Louis really ought to be doing some heavy lifting, huge son of a bitch that he is), and he comes to life when interacting with some of the story’s less morally invested characters. In particular, the con-man Ashley – himself a delightfully sleazy fellow – makes a great foil for Louis and Miriam both.
Those hiccups didn’t do much to stop Blackbirds from getting an easy-to-reach spot on my bookshelf, though, and they shouldn’t stop you either. Chuck Wendig crafted a tasty little slice of fiction, the kind of book that lives or dies by the voice of its main character, and luckily she’s got a great one. And best of all, the sequel is out just…about…now. Mockingbird will be reviewed in this very same space next Monday; that gives you a week to go buy and read Blackbirds. Go, read, enjoy.
