Gods of Chicago AJ Sikes 9781495943430 Books
Download As PDF : Gods of Chicago AJ Sikes 9781495943430 Books
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Gods of Chicago AJ Sikes 9781495943430 Books
In 'Gods of Chicago' Sikes introduces us to an alternative history Prohibition-era Chicago, on the day of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Our hard-drinking two-fisted newshawk hero is Mitchell Brand, a refreshingly believable main character with his backstory, his hopes and fears, his darkly poetic dialogue and noir one-liners, and his righteous anger at the chaos in which he unwittingly finds himself. Also sharing the narrative is Emma Farnsworth, a well-rounded female character who moves from being a victim of circumstance to a woman courageously fighting for her life and the lives of those around her. Her interactions with this novel's plethora of villains and her flight through an ever-darkening city succumbing to fear, despair and anger are wonderfully written.Al Capone and Frank Nitti are featured in the novel, but their roles are not what you'd expect. There are other players at work, agents of horrifying schemes and hosts for the eponymous Gods; Jameson Crane and his crony Wynes made my skin crawl, although spoilers forbid me to say why. Then there are the Bicycle Men, who transcend time and space as they travel across Chicago carrying mysterious messages.
As for the plot ... well if you ask me, twisted pulp thrillers are always best when you have multiple antagonists who clash in following logical paths to plausible goals. In Gods of Chicago, if this sometimes makes Brand and Farnsworth look powerless, it only increases the story's reality and impact. Brand is hardly ever in control, and therefore the reader feels his peril is real.
I could parallel the plot of Gods of Chicago to a stick of dynamite about to blow up. The first half of the book is the fuse that gradually burns down, and when it expires we're exposed to the second half of the book. The plot explodes into a war that envelops the whole of Chicago, and the residents are forced into a desperate struggle for survival.
There are all kinds of supernatural incursions and alternative-history versions of technology and real-life people to keep track of, but fundamentally this novel is a solid, thrilling adventure yarn with Mitchell Brand at its core. Brand is by no means noble or innocent, but he shines against the corporate scum - both human and inhuman -who are carving up Chicago for themselves. With sympathetic characters to keep us grounded, everything feels like it's in balance, so the demons and magic fit in with Dieselpunk airships and science and Tesla-isms without jarring contradiction.
I loved it. Sikes is a storyteller, a wit and a wordsmith and he's done things with the noir thriller genre that no one has thought to do before.
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Gods of Chicago AJ Sikes 9781495943430 Books Reviews
I can't say I've read anything quite like "Gods of Chicago." It's where noir, steampunk, alternative history, and mythology all meet. This first episode flows fast and the descriptions are solid. The story is just getting started, so there isn't much to say yet, but I'm waiting on bated breath for the second episode.
I thought I would like this story from all the reviews, but I couldn't get into it. I had to just give up and let it go. I guess dieselpunk is just not for me. Sorry.
What a great book! Sort of a 20s gangster story with holocaust overtones, set in a really cool magical world that had me wanting more, more, more. Reminded me a little bit like American Gods, but wholly original unto itself. One of the things I liked most about it, aside from the magic and diesel-punk automatons, was the language used. Lots of fun slang from the 20s that you can figure out through context, adding a whole new dimension to the story. Very smoothly done, just the way you'd expect in a period piece movie by a good director.
Although of course there are Perils, steampunk-type stories are (in my experience) usually fairly light-hearted, more adventure and derring-do than serious alternate history. I expected “dieselpunk,” which I assumed was more or less like steampunk except for being set in an alternate 1920s-1930s milieu rather than a Victorian one—this was my first experience of it—to be similar. Similarly, “noir” mystery stories, which this book also seemed to promise to be, usually have their bleakness offset by a fair amount of humor, even if it’s black humor. This novel, however, was just plain grim basically, it transmogrified late 20s-early 30s Chicago, here called Chicago City, into something like late-1930s Berlin, complete with eugenic roundups of “lesser” races (meaning “gypsies” and “negroes”—very little mention of Jews) and all-out warfare in the streets.
Part of my reason for not liking the book much, then, came from the fact that I found myself dumped into a dystopia, and I’m not fond of dystopias. That wasn’t all, however. The characters were adequate, but I never really warmed to any of them, except perhaps the newsboys and the gypsies, who kept getting killed off. Alternate technology, usually a main feature of steampunk novels, was not much developed, either; yes, there were airships and robot soldiers, but nothing very interesting was done with them, and no really unusual technologies appeared.
I also didn’t think the fantasy elements were well handled. There was a Real Monster, in addition to the human ones, and indications that there was a “city behind the city” in which “gods” pulled the levers, but again, not much was really made of these ideas. I found the brief section at the end, in which the main human characters suddenly became allegory-style representations of abstract characteristics such as Hubris and Integrity, to be particularly intrusive and irritating; the idea made these already somewhat stereotyped characters go completely flat.
In short, the only thing that was done effectively was the Nazi-style dystopia, which I didn’t want to experience. If you are interested in that kind of thing, you may like the book better than I did. Otherwise, I can’t recommend it.
In 'Gods of Chicago' Sikes introduces us to an alternative history Prohibition-era Chicago, on the day of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Our hard-drinking two-fisted newshawk hero is Mitchell Brand, a refreshingly believable main character with his backstory, his hopes and fears, his darkly poetic dialogue and noir one-liners, and his righteous anger at the chaos in which he unwittingly finds himself. Also sharing the narrative is Emma Farnsworth, a well-rounded female character who moves from being a victim of circumstance to a woman courageously fighting for her life and the lives of those around her. Her interactions with this novel's plethora of villains and her flight through an ever-darkening city succumbing to fear, despair and anger are wonderfully written.
Al Capone and Frank Nitti are featured in the novel, but their roles are not what you'd expect. There are other players at work, agents of horrifying schemes and hosts for the eponymous Gods; Jameson Crane and his crony Wynes made my skin crawl, although spoilers forbid me to say why. Then there are the Bicycle Men, who transcend time and space as they travel across Chicago carrying mysterious messages.
As for the plot ... well if you ask me, twisted pulp thrillers are always best when you have multiple antagonists who clash in following logical paths to plausible goals. In Gods of Chicago, if this sometimes makes Brand and Farnsworth look powerless, it only increases the story's reality and impact. Brand is hardly ever in control, and therefore the reader feels his peril is real.
I could parallel the plot of Gods of Chicago to a stick of dynamite about to blow up. The first half of the book is the fuse that gradually burns down, and when it expires we're exposed to the second half of the book. The plot explodes into a war that envelops the whole of Chicago, and the residents are forced into a desperate struggle for survival.
There are all kinds of supernatural incursions and alternative-history versions of technology and real-life people to keep track of, but fundamentally this novel is a solid, thrilling adventure yarn with Mitchell Brand at its core. Brand is by no means noble or innocent, but he shines against the corporate scum - both human and inhuman -who are carving up Chicago for themselves. With sympathetic characters to keep us grounded, everything feels like it's in balance, so the demons and magic fit in with Dieselpunk airships and science and Tesla-isms without jarring contradiction.
I loved it. Sikes is a storyteller, a wit and a wordsmith and he's done things with the noir thriller genre that no one has thought to do before.
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