Synopsis:
“Picture this:The time was precisely 07:03 a.m., on 25th of January, 2011, a dreary Sunday morning and Alfie Lime had a dead girl in his bed.”
So starts And The Street Screamed Blue Murder! the latest novella from the mind of Jason Michel – Pushcart Prize nominee and The Dictator of the cult Pulp Metal Magazine. It is the tragic history of Alfie Lime, a journalist working for a whistle-blowing paper who becomes trapped in a series of sinister events that will change his life forever. Beginning with an impossible murder, the story leads us on a spiraling journey of betrayal into the surreal underbelly of Paris and its most secret street. A mysterious street where the inhabitants are not what they appear to be.
And neither is anything else …
Review:
This novella features all the gritty blackness you’d expect from Pulp Metal Magazine’s Dictator. The opening set piece of gruesome discovery would please your old Ripper to bits. Alfie Lime’s grisly wake up call sets the mood, but it’s the deepening paranoia of his flight afterward that offers the true flavour of the story. Things are what they seem on Rue de la Morte (where “Screams are greetings”) and you don’t really know who you can trust. It’s one of the great tensions of good noir: you never know if you believe what you’re told, but you have to put your life in someone’s hands eventually.
But Michel’s work isn’t your garden variety noir. If you’re well versed in the occult arts, you’ll find a lot here to make you smile with recognition (though I wonder if the less magically inclined will feel all the resonances) and nod your head grimly. There’s a ferocious madness that grips Lime, casting him back and forth across the barriers of the known world in a desperate attempt to understand what’s happened and find out who’s really behind the frame-up — if frame up it is.
The novella is part of the world where many of Michel’s stories take place: Old Lurk. No one returns from a visit quite the same.
~ K. A. Laity
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A Knife And A Quill- old 
Ta very much, Kate.
Thanks for writing it!
Reblogged this on 13 Shots Of Grit.
Great review- and I’m sure that I didn’t get all of the magic references but it’s a great a rich world that he created there.
Indeed, I’m assuming from all the enthusiastic reviews that it works on others levels perfectly well. Good stuff!