|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
Sometimes there's only one way to start a review, so here goes: "Cat in a Neon Nightmare," the fifteenth entry in Carole Nelson Douglas's Midnight Louie series, is the weirdest book I've ever read. First, there's a talking cat. Two of them in fact: Midnight Louie, and his possible daughter, Midnight Louise. They don't actually talk to people of course - that would be silly - but they converse quite freely with each other, and other cats, as Louie relates in the sections of the book that he narrates. Fine, talking cat. Writing cat. Rita Mae Brown's been riding that gravy train for years. But consider Louie's human counterpart, Temple Barr, a spunky redheaded Las Vegas PR agent. Well, truthfully, Temple, the human heroine of the series, hardly figures in this book at all. Most of the book gives us two other points on Temple's love triangle - magician Max Kinsella and ex-priest/ talk show host Matt Devine. Max is tall dark, Irish, and handsome. Matt is tan, blonde, Polish (despite his apparently Irish surname), and handsome. Max is suave, stealthy, a master of disguise, and a highly trained government counterterrorism agent. Matt is a Big Whiner. To be fair, Matt has his reasons - a history of family abuse, disillusionment with his religion, and an insane rogue-IRA stalker (Kitty the Cutter) who is obsessed with the state of his virginity. The mystery -other than the question of why Temple would even consider leaving Max for Mr. Whine Devine - involves the fatal fall of a prostitute who had recently rendezvoused with Matt. A chink in the holy armor? Oh no. He saw the woman in order to throw the mad stalker off of his trail. Matt is a virgin (at least he was before meeting the prostitute), and once he loses his virginity, the stalker will leave him be, although Matt did not actually want the stalker to know he was possibly sleeping with the call girl at the time it was (or wasn't?) happening. This appears to have been explained in the previous volume in the series where, unlike here, it might have made some sense. The weirdest thing about "Cat in a Neon Nightmare" is that the author doesn't seem to realize how weird it is. Just as we whiz along through a pleasantly escapist plot, Douglas stops it dead with a lecture on prostitution, sexual abuse by priests, terrorism (a jaw dropping number of throwaway references to 9/11, which seem solely intended to let us know the author is hip to current events; she might have accomplished this more effectively by omitting a few of the O.J. Simpson jokes), and sexual morality (in my favorite line of the book, Temple tells herself to stick with Max because "You didn't throw away a mutually monogamous commitment in the age of AIDS." And they say romance is dead). Is this an Op-Ed page or a book about a crime-solving cat? (Did I mention the ghost of Elvis? Or maybe he's actually Elvis. I'm not so clear on that). I haven't read any previous Midnight Louie books, and I don't know how well "Neon" will work for people familiar with the earlier volumes. I felt like I was tuning into a random episode of a long-running soap, and its easy to imagine getting caught up, over time, in the machinations of the various subplots. (I think of my own addiction to Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody series - to which, I must be clear, Douglas's work does not hold a candle). The book does suffer from an unnecessary introduction and enormous chunks of backstory that are only slightly related to the present plot. This sort of thing can only confuse readers who don't know the whole series and bore ones who do. When it's not held up by excessive sermonizing, or unnecessary exposition, the book does have an undeniable flow. A good deal of it is funny, and a few of the dramatic scenes are quite good; a late encounter among Matt and Max and a bottle of Bushmills particularly stands out. In fact, most of the life in this volume belongs to Max. In the book's best scenes, he sneaks around the Neon Nightmare, a dance club run by a cabal of evil magicians. The intrigues of the warring magicians (reminiscent of Glen David Gold's terrific "Carter Beats the Devil"), the descriptions of the club, and a chase scene through a forest of vintage Vegas neon, pull the reader in and speed the story along. I can't help thinking Max could be having a lot more fun somewhere far from the rest of this crew, human and feline. And Matt Devine? The man seriously needs to get laid.
Reviewed by Caroline Pruett, May 2003
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
|
