Low Town: The Straight Razor Cure: Low Town 1

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If it wasn’t clear from that opening paragraph, Low Town is fantasy noir. It’s a dark novel about cynical people in a grimy part of town. Its main characters are street hustlers, petty criminals, and corrupt cops. It’s set in a part of the city where actual law enforcement officers tread lightly and a rough sort of justice is usually enforced by whichever crime lord runs that particular area. It starts off with Warden taking a hit of pixie’s breath—one of the drugs he both sells and frequently uses—to help him face the day, and then tossing the contents of his bed pan out of the window into the alley below before trudging down to the bar below for his breakfast. No sparkly elves making merry in this fantasy, folks. I also mentioned some of the slang, like hoax and pixie dust, but this book is full of this very colorful language that really pulls you into the world. What's quite impressive about it is that it feels organic to the story and not just slapped together and placed in there like other fantasy books I've read.

In the tradition of Daniel Hammett and Gene Wolfe comes LOW TOWN THE STRAIGHT RAZOR CURE, a novel about the taint of blood and the impossibility of redemption. Bold, brilliant writing makes this a debut that will change the fantasy world landscape. Before I got into fantasy, I was a fan of hard-boiled crime and noir. I think Polansky hit all the right notes here, creating a memorable character (Warden), a memorable and gritty setting (Low Town), and a compelling plot. So, ‘Low Town’ by Daniel Polansky is awesome. It’s everything I love in a detective noir book. And this one just happens to be set in a fantasy realm as well, and for me, that’s just icing on the cake. A very large prehistoric promontory fort surviving as upstanding earthworks and buried deposits including a box rampart considered to date to the early/middle Iron Age (around 500-400BC) excavated in 1969-1970, the whole monument surveyed by English Heritage in 2001.Overall I’m going to say that this just isn’t my particular cup-o-tea. Maybe I’d like The Warden more if he was an addict trying to survive and crawl his way out of the gutter. Or maybe I’d like him more if he was just a drug dealer that didn’t use his own product but for some reason the combination of the two just didn’t work for me and at no point in the story did he even try to give up the drugs. He lived off them and needed them to get through the day. It really interrupted my attempt to care about him.

The best part of this noir/fantasy mashup is that I feel that this is not just a noir book with fantasy furniture or vice versa. Both the elements of noir and the elements of fantasy are essential to the story. For instance, the voice and the concept of the story would fail miserably without the noir part, and the plot would be impossible without the fantasy elements.

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This is one of the few series that I think at book 1 I’ve decided it isn’t for me and I won’t be continuing. But I do want to say that the writing is very well done and if these things don’t bother you in you reading it might still work for you.

Well this didn't go quite as planned. When I started writing this fascinating review, I'd decided to go for a 3-star rating and to continue with the series. Now I'm struggling NOT to lower my rating to 2 miserable little stars. But The Builders + I'm feeling uncharacteristically lenient today = I'll leave it at 3 2.5. As for the rest of the series, well… The secondary characters aren’t fleshed out very well. There is this instant going into the end and I’m trying to buy into why someone is taking children to sacrifice them and I didn’t have enough there to just go with it. St Leonard’s has come through a few calamities, the most destructive being a fire that destroyed most of the High Town during the Parliamentarian siege in 1646 during the Civil War.A fun rural outing if you’re in Bridgnorth with younger children, Rays Farm has friendly domestic animals, paths in ancient woodland and soft play areas. Low Town can be described as a mix of fantasy and noir with some underdeveloped magic. The narrative revolves around Warden's present and past. He is a soldier turned junkie and drug dealer. But with morals. Questionable ones, to be sure, but still. The incident that led to this is (more or less) unspecified. A strong debut novel with a hero who doesn't waste time worrying about the moral implications of cutting someone's throat." -- Kirkus Overall, The Strait Razor Cure is a good first introduction to the world - or rather the underworld would be more proper - of Low Town, with Daniel Polansky showing his skills like an experienced fantasy writer to make a powerful and impressive adventure which puts us deep into the protagonist’s past and a mysterious case into its darkest secrets - and what we will find at the end is even more twisted, yet beautifully executed.