The Next Time I Die Miękka oprawa
Opcje zakupu i dodatki
DYING WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING.
Steven Blitz didn't think about his own safety when he saw the man trying to force a woman into his car. He stepped in to defend her, and got a knife to the gut for his troubles.
But when he wakes up in the hospital from what should have been a fatal wound, he finds the whole world changed - a different president in the White House, a loving family when he'd been on the verge of divorce, more money in the bank than he's ever seen. There's a dark side, though: in this world, Steven Blitz is not a good man. And now he's got to get himself out of serious trouble without even knowing what it is he's done wrong.
"Jason Starr is the first writer of his generation to convincingly update the modern crime novel by giving it provocative new spins."
--Bret Easton Ellis
- Długość wersji drukowanej256 str.
- JęzykAngielski
- WydawcaHard Case Crime
- Wymiary12.7 x 1.68 x 20.27 cm
- ISBN-10178909951X
- ISBN-13978-1789099515
Opis produktu
Recenzja
IAN RANKIN
"I really don't know how Jason Starr does it: I start out thinking I'm only going to read a chapter and an hour later I'm on page eighty."
BRET EASTON ELLIS
"A paranoid noir freakout playing its own one-of-a-kind game... and a shameless page-turner."
JOE HILL
"An audacious mindbender of a novel. A high-octane cocktail of infidelity, murder and alternate realities, served up straight from the Twilight Zone."
WALLACE STROBY
"Beautifully and perfectly crafted. Halfway between Christopher Nolan's Memento and a story by Philip K. Dick."
MATTEO STRUKUL
"With The Next Time I Die, Jason Starr has taken a next level leap... It's like Philip K. Dick is still with us and has just written a new, brain-frying work of New York noir."
BRIAN GREENE, CRIMINAL ELEMENT
"It might be my favorite of his books ever. I read it in one day and haven't stopped thinking about it since. Highly recommended."
ED BRUBAKER
"Jason Starr is one of the sharpest, most entertaining writers of crime fiction working today, and this book will bend your brain. Strongly recommended."
RAY GARTON, author of Live Girls
"As in the best nightmarish noir, Starr ups the ante" - Publishers Weekly
"A verifiable page turner with bona fide twists...could launch plenty of juicy book club discussions." - Previews World Scoop
"One tasty bit of noir that will leave your head thumping against the wall." - Dave's Pulp and Mystery Reads
"Mind-bending, genre-blending...the story is dark, twisted, funny, frightening, and - in a strange way - uplifting." - David Pitt, Booklist
"Completely enthralling. THE NEXT TIME I DIE is sharp, super-suspenseful and impossible to put down." -Alison Gaylin
"Swift-moving and entrancing"
LOCUS
"An adrenaline rush of a read that's exhilarating, frightening, violent, hallucinatory, and I-can't-believe-that-just-happened shock-inducing."
CRIMINAL ELEMENT
"Starr melds noir and a multiverse narrative to create a sinuous, high-wire act of a novel. It's an unabashed page-turner."
CRIMEREADS
"A masterfully told tale." - Midwest Book Review
O autorze
Szczegóły produktu
- Język : Angielski
- Miękka oprawa : 256 str.
- ISBN-10 : 178909951X
- ISBN-13 : 978-1789099515
- Wymiary : 12.7 x 1.68 x 20.27 cm
- Recenzje klientów:
Opinie o produkcie
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Jason Starr.
First Publication Anywhere.
Hard Case Crime - June 2022
"Did you mow the lawn?"
"No."
"Did you walk the dog?"
"No."
"Well then, what did you do today?"
"I started Jason Starr's new blockbuster novel, The Next Time You Die," and did not stop reading until I finished it this evening. It was like I was I was living in another existence for 252 pages"
"You're delusional"
Indeed.
Jason Starr never fails to surprise, shock and thrill, and with The Next Time You Die, he knocks it out of the stadium. Once started the reader will be hard-pressed to set it aside.
Steven Blitz wakes up in a hospital after a suffering what should have been a fatal stabbing, and finds the world he thinks he lives in, is not the world he did live in, before the incident.
Who are these people in the room? Why do they look familiar, yet not quite the same. Why does a wife that hates him and threw him out of the house, now treat him lovingly? How can he have a daughter, when he never did? Why does he not have a deep wound on his abdomen where he was cut, and should have died?
What the hell is going on?
Jason Starr is a master of his craft, and with The Next Time You Die he has done it again. A marvelously conceived story, with riveting dialogue, and a wild, dark, well-plotted story.
A fully-charged electric noir novel for our times.
A guy wakes up after an accident, (or is it two?) to find himself living along two different timelines. Part satire, part mystery, part sci-fi, and a whole lot of nonsense.
Okay. My actual review.
My reaction, even from the first page, is that this the book reads very much like a short Stephen King book along the lines of Elevation: the writing style felt similar, as did the main characters and setting. The storyline is straight out of the universe of the old episodes of The Twilight Zone, as stated on the back cover, here involving alternate realities.
This is the tale of a lawyer, Steven, who is having a bad time in his life while busily defending a serial killer at a major trial and is facing a marriage breakup. Steven's 'life' gets a whole lot weirder when meets a sticky end one night. However, instead of going to the Pearly Gates, he awakens in hospital in a different reality! This alternate reality has some distinct similarities to the alt-universe of the TV show Fringe, notably in New York. Steven finds himself in a much better financial and domestic situation, with a loving wife and child, but the version of himself whom he's displaced from this reality was clearly not a nice man.
Steven's adventure mixes culture shock comedy with a well-thought-out, reasonably credible alternate history (however the 'orange man bad' stuff felt forced.) At the same time, Steven can't stop investigating the serial killer from his own timeline, who is running free here and hasn't been caught.
The book is enjoyable enough, albeit feather light. There's a lot more that could have been done with certain story elements - the serial killer storyline comes and goes and involves some deeply stupid behaviour at one point, which is there purely to set up events later in the book; a subplot involving a crime the alt-Steve had been caught up in before 'our' Steve arrived merited greater story space and Steven's parallel world legal career could have been gone into more. Also Steven's investigations into the moment where reality shifted and why left me on tenterhooks.
Of course, while some of Steven's decisions don't make sense, we are certainly in 'unreliable narrator' territory from the co-author of the splendidly amoral adventures of Max and Angela. I'd love to discuss the ending, which I'm ambivalent about, but I'm desperately trying to avoid spoilers. There are shades of David Lynch's Lost Highway and Vertigo.
I think the difficulty is, perhaps, that Jason Starr is a successful crime novelist who has also worked in genre comics and novel tie-ins to comics, but hasn't worked much in the science fiction-fantasy genre with his own creations - had he done so, he might have avoided one or two of the more obvious pitfalls, boldly taking prolific SF-fantasy readers like me where I've gone many times before. Science fiction and fantasy writing isn't easy and non-SF-fantasy writers tend to think they're coming up with novel ideas, when in fact they were old a century ago.
Nevertheless, I think there's genuine potential for a sequel or two here about our reality-hopping main character in search of his ideal life, while using knowledge gained while in one reality to fight crime in another reality. Steven could be in Quantum Leap/Sliders territory!
So, three stars for the book as a standalone - it's a light and pleasurable read that I knocked off in a couple of nights in spite of a heavy work schedule - and an extra star for the potential for it to spin off into some interesting sequels. It doesn't break new ground, it has a bunch of SF-fantasy clichés and is thus a bit predictable, but it passes the time most enjoyably. Hard Case Crime successfully continues in its mission give us short, entertaining reads - in an era of three-hour movies and 'literary fiction' books the size of a breeze block, that's a blessing!