These Mean Streets, Darkly (A Liquid Cool Prequel)

=== T H E B A D ===

§ HELL LOTTA EXPOSITION: The author included entire paragraphs of explanations without letting our understanding of the world flow naturally. He tells instead of showing, which artificially enlarges the book—that is, for there is little to no story and a lot of exposition. It also helps to drag the pace, making it slower than it should be.

§ OFFICERS & FEMALE OFFICERS: There is a weird use of the word “female,” to an extent that it gets uncomfortable to read. No man is ever referred to as ‘male’ in this book, thus giving the use of ‘female’ a heavy derogatory tone by establishing ‘male’ as the default and ‘female’ as a variation of it.
He calls the policemen “officers,” but the policewoman he calls “female officer,” which becomes even worst in a scene in which the only officer is a woman, and her gender is mentioned again and again, and again—for no good reason. The thing is: you won’t call a woman a policeMEN, because she is not a man, you’ll call her a policeWOMAN, but the word “officer” has no gender attached to it, thus making the use of “female officer” slightly sexist—which can be unintentional but is still there.

§ BY THE WORD: The word count seems to be increased by the usage of more words for the sake of using more words. Despite it being a short piece, it has a lot of filler words. Phrases are longer than they should, making the pace even slower.

§ THE NARRATOR ISN’T A CHARACTER, BUT DESPERATELY WANTS TO BE: The narrator isn’t a character, yet, he acts like one. It looks like he was to be, but ended up not being, which is slightly mind-boggling. Also, the author repeatedly uses long descriptions in scenes that don’t ask them with words like “but” and “and” plus his more colloquial mannerisms, which all contribute to making phrases longer by giving them more a complex structure and filling them with adjectives and speech marks—further damaging the pace.
Long descriptions should create suspense, they should be a build up for a twist or just a way to trigger your brain to play scenarios, imagining probable outcomes that may be very far from the actual conclusion of the scene. This book ignores this idea and shows us some detailed suspenseless—chill even—scene for no good reason. It is different from a bomb you know exists and is waiting to blow up, but doesn’t. There are no stakes, no setup—only a build up to no payoff.

§ A SILLY, YET UNFUNNY, NAMING CONVENTION: All the characters are named after inanimate objects, colours, concepts and actions. I read this author’s book titles and ‘Blade Gunner’ yells not to take it too seriously. The problem is These Mean Streets: Darkly’s cover and title scream: “take me seriously, I’m Batman.” and then it doesn’t care to make itself serious for us to take it thus. I’d say one needs a certain dynamic between Serious and Silly—Fallout masterfully balances that (the rest is debatable). The world is a serious one, populated with wars and suffering and unimaginable pain, but there are many silly things going on all the time. What horrible experiments did Vault Tech perform in this particular group of individuals? Maybe it was awfully grotesque like the experiments of FEV on humans; maybe it was a cloning machine that resulted in a vault full of Garys. Their paradox between ‘serious’ and ‘whacky’ has to be intended, deliberate to form dark humour. It has to have meaning, it has to be comically paradoxical, else it’s just walking nonsense amidst serious stuff, some unwanted bathos sparkled around the piece. It has to belong. This ain’t the case. Bus, Break, Boot and Cap have no funny twist to them, don’t seem to belong to the world.
Naming characters as such works sometimes, though. Spoon and Audio in Southsayed are names which belong to the world and you can still care for the characters despite their names being so nonsensical to our standards—because they belong there.

§ INCONSISTENCY: There’s a moment in which the city is described as ten times bigger than Seattle, and there are people who apparently know the story of each street—not only do they know the streets, but they’re also so very familiar with their own unique stories. Cars fly, the place is huge—these mean streets seem hard to remember. Characters also have a very hard time reacting accordingly to situations. One moment you are the sassiest hostage, the other you are crying after you’ve been saved.

§ THE AUTHOR DOESN’T SEPARATE SCENES: Austin arbitrarily divides his book. A chapter may be a scene or multiple scenes, which brings up a few problems—namely the fact that you are going to start reading a different scene still thinking you’re reading the previous one. With three asterisks you can divide your scenes and avoid having the reader guess and re-read a section to situate him or herself. Immersion on a book is very hard—you haven’t, most of the time, any imagery to showcase the world; you almost always depend on setting the mood and situating the reader through words, leaving his or her imagination do the work. It is not a problem and it is not that hard to fix in this book—his only fault in this one topic was not using three asterisks or one line or just dividing his scenes by naming them chapters.

§ THE DIALOGUE IS CONFUSING: “The author writes, almost all the time, a line of dialogue followed by who said it,” explained Raul. “The problem is, even if he does that,” added Raul, “he refuses to use ‘said’.” ‘Said’ is very short and easy to read, making it almost unnoticeable when reading any piece dialogue (which makes it the best verb to use as a dialogue tag, given it won’t damage the pace). “He also,” continued Raul, “despite writing who said each line all the time, manages to make it very unclear who’s speaking at certain moments.” Raul knew that if the characters were undiscernable in voice when without the dialogue tags it wasn’t a great sign, you know? But he wasn’t going to say it.
This was an unfunny attempt to mimic that which is being criticised, though I exaggerated a bit.

§ LACK OF CHARACTER MOTIF: The reason why things happen is completely overlooked. No character has any reason to do anything, yet, they do. A story is composed of “and” (occurrences), “but” (obstacles) and “because” (consequences); but this story is reliant solely on “and.” Something happens and something happens and so on, so forth most of the time—you barely get to see obstacles and consequences, which brings us to the point…

§ LACK OF A STORY: Set up, build up, pay off—these are the rough stages of a story. This said prequel to ‘Liquid Cool’ is the set up for ‘Liquid Cool’. There are many characters, plotlines, and concepts introduced never to be seen again. This book is only the introduction to the one that follows it, so don’t expect a story. All setup, little buildup, no payoff. Everything seems filler.

§ THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A SYNONYM: He repeatedly refers to characters by their title plus name to they repeat their name/title without any alternation between the two. It can be annoying for some folk.

=== T H E G O O D ===

§ The premise is interesting.