Friday, August 3, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia




Certain Dark Things is the second book I've read by Silvia Moreno-Garcia but the first real Scifi/Fantasy story (the other, The Beautiful Ones, is really a full Romance Novel with very very minor fantastical elements, but is excellent and well worth your time).  It's also a vampire story, a genre I don't read much of, but one that's very different from most such stories I've seen.  A Vampire/Gangster story set in Mexico City, featuring a naive human boy, a vampire-hunting bitter policewoman, and a Mexican/Aztec Vampire girl on the run from a European Vampire gang, Certain Dark Things stands out by virtue of its very different setting.  And well, it's also rather good.

If you don't like vampire stories, Certain Dark Things won't change your mind.  If you're merely ambivalent like myself, I think you'll enjoy it.  Also note I "read" this book as an audiobook, and the reader is pretty good, so if you want to read in that format, go right ahead.

More after the jump:

---------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------
Domingo is a street kid - well teenager - on the streets of Mexico City, who gets by mainly by collecting junk from the streets and selling it.  He dreams of the world of his comic books, and somehow maintains an optimistic view of the world despite some pretty bad hardships.  But when he is caught staring at a pretty girl on the subway, his life changes....as that vampire turns out to be Atl, the last of an Aztec Vampire Clan.  Mexico City is supposed to be a no-vampire zone, and Domingo has never seen an actual Vampire, and he quickly falls in love.

Atl on the other hand, would never think of loving a human....or would she?  The last of her clan after they were murdered by a gangster clan of European vampires - "Necros" - Atl is hiding in Mexico City to get away from a punk Vampire who wants to finish her clan's extermination, desperate to find some way to get out of the country.  But she's running out of options, not to mention food - she can only eat young people's blood - and she's on the run from not just the Necro punk, but also the human gangs of Mexico City and a policewoman with a knowledge of hunting vampires from her life outside the City.

If Atl - with Domingo in tow - wants to get out of the City, she'll need a lot of luck and for some uncertain allies to turn out to be trustworthy....but she doesn't have any other choice.
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Certain Dark Things' best attribute - and it's a good one - is its confidence in setting up its very different worldbuilding, whether it be in the state of Mexico and Mexico City or the state of the Vampire race in the world.  The book sets up a world where the existence of vampires became commonly-known in the 1960s and where vampires exist as a general race filled with many subspecies with different traits (although all vampires are vampires from birth -no one can be turned from a human into a vampire) - so the Aztec Vampires* have bird-like traits and can only feed on young blood, the European "Necros" can mind control people by feeding them their blood and can feed even on the dead, the Revenants can both take/feed on people's life forces (including that of Vampires) or can donate their own life force energey to others, etc.  We only do see three vampire characters in this book (not counting flashbacks) and yet the species still feels very fleshed out, and it works pretty well.

*I read this again as an audiobook so I'm not even going to try to spell the Aztec names out from the audio sorry*

Also making this work really well is the book's setting of Mexico City, or Mexico in general for some of the flashbacks.  Building quite clearly on our version of Mexico and the corruption inherent in its politics/policing and the like, it presents a very different setting for this battle of Vampires.  We see a lot of this setting from the third main character (police detective Ana Aguirre), and it really works as a nice change from the typical European or American vampire setting and the book really uses the setting - it's not just background noise, but has real impact on the plot and how the characters think and work.

And most of the characters do work really well.  Atl and Domingo have a gender-flipped version of a classic fantasy/vampire relationship - HE is the naive optimist always looking for the bright side of a real cruel world while SHE is the Vampire with power that knows better, on the run from her troubled past.  Their romance winds up working really well, and it's easy to root for them even as Atl's past crimes come to light.  And while the main antagonist - the Necro vampire Nick - is just kind of a generic spoiled brat bad guy, his Renfield handler, who is also one of our POV characters, was kind of interesting even if he's working for the bad guys as an example of how an established human worker for a Vampire clan has to act.

That said, the plot itself isn't particularly great, with a couple of twists being easy to see coming.  Moreover, one repeated concern from Atl about her situation, hammered enough times in the narrative that you have to expect it's going to happen, never does, and the book never really establishes a good enough reason for this.*

*Spoiler Explanation in ROT13 :Va rffrapr, Ngy ercrngrqyl jbeevrf nobhg ure cbgragvny nyyl Oreaneqvaub, n Eriranag jub jnf na nffbpvngr bs ure bzgure, jvyy ghea ba ure.  Naq juvyr vg frrzf sbe n frpbaq ng gur raqvat ur'f tbvat gb va beqre gb fnir uvzfrys, ur arire qbrf naq va snpg frrzf gb fnpevsvpr uvf bja urnygu ng n cerpnevbhf zbzrag sbe ure.  Ur rkcynvaf ubj Ngy'f zbgure fnirq uvz ng bar cbvag, ohg gurer'f ab ernfba jul Oreaneqvaub fubhyq or fb gehr na nyyl nf ur jvaqf hc, naq vg'f n ovg naablvat.

Moreover, the fifth POV character, Policewoman Ana Aguirre, who is hunting both our protagonist and the antagonist with the help of some unsavory characters, is kind of hit or miss.  On one hand, her story is somewhat interesting, on the other hand it is the least interesting and unique of the stories, and it winds up going in an unsatisfactory direction in the end, at least to me.  The book is NOT her story at heart (its Atl's and Domingo's) but the book tries to make it such at times and the result is kind of a downer.

Still, I liked Certain Dark Things, and if you're interested in a different take of a Vampire story, I would recommend it.

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