Electric Church

Electric Church
by Jeff Somers

Avery Cates is a gunner; a freelance assassin in the bleak near-future where old cities like New York and London are vast ruined ghettos. In typical noir style, our hero is flawed, cynical, and down on his luck; and then things go from bad to worse. On the peripheral are the Monks: robots with human brains, pursuing salvation through indefinitely extended lifespans. Avery Cate and the Monks soon find themselves on opposite ends of a battle for the species, and someone is in for a world of hurt.

I love everything about Jeff Somers. Electric Church is an outstanding debut effort. His promise shows not in how great the book is, but in that he falls into amateurish pitfalls and still manages to pull off a decent, marketable read.

He completely hooks you with the first paragraph, but then he proceeds to tell the rest of the "prologue" as a painfully slow, blow by blow action sequence with info dump after info dump inserted between the gunshots and explosions. He barely pulls it off; a lesser writer would have completely lost the reader's interest right there.

The whole book is almost entirely action driven. Good action sequences are hard to write, let alone a whole book of it. There is a lack of character or plot development, and the very best most intriguing part of the story, the Monks, is underdeveloped, as is the setting.

The flip side is that he keeps everything simple enough to prevent painting himself into corners. It is in the end a formulaic noir novel. The gritty dialog, hard-boiled exploits, etc, allow for a simple action hero story to happen. I don't mind so much that I know who's going to get killed on page 45, and how, fifteen pages earlier. I don't mind so much that around page 100, just when I'm starting to wonder if the glaring lack of female characters is a peak into our hero's psyche or our author's, females characters suddenly appear.

Somers' strong suit is consistently crisp, skillful prose, and consistency in the characters points of view and voices. There is very little that stands out as curious or questionable, given the setting. However, there is only enough solid content here for a good really long short story. Storytelling from a single point of view doesn't help either.

Somers is destined to be a voice to be reckoned with; this is a good chance to collect a first edition that unquestionably shows talent. Yeah, you may want to skim some of the slow spots, but what he lacks in experience he more than makes up for in enthusiasm and tenacity.

If you can't find it locally

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