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papidoc's review against another edition
3.0
Vachss has a unique, gritty style...crime noir for sure. This was a little different than his other novels, though, with a tinge of the supernatural. A little more confusing and with the stylistic prose that is characteristic of Vachss's writing. Not bad, but not among his best.
papi's review against another edition
3.0
Vachss has a unique, gritty style...crime noir for sure. This was a little different than his other novels, though, with a tinge of the supernatural. A little more confusing and with the stylistic prose that is characteristic of Vachss's writing. Not bad, but not among his best.
nicollemk's review against another edition
3.0
Vachss is one of my favorite authors. This was certainly an interesting story with a supernatural twist to it, but not as good as some of his other works. I feel like it could have been expanded more.
guiltyfeat's review
1.0
I've read enough Andrew Vachss to know that he isn't always at the top of his game, but this was completely rubbish. It never made sense and the elements never cohered in this weird mash up of streetwise mercenaries taking on a supernatural cloud of murder... or something. Then the whole thing concludes 40 pages before the end of the book, so Vachss rehashes an old short story and tacks it on as an "epilogue". Really poor stuff.
brettt's review
1.0
After lawyer, child protection advocate and author Andrew Vachss ended his best-known Burke series with 2008's Another Life, he published several standalone novels before taking a crack at another recurring series. When he did in 2012, using the mercenary Cross and his crew for hire, he didn't really break new ground.
Blackjack borrows the story Vachss wrote for the Dark Horse comic book Predator: Race War in the early 1990s and tweaks it to remove references to the hunting alien made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1987 movie. He then combines it with a previously published short story about Cross's crew and ties them together rather loosely around some of the characters of the comic book adaptation.
The alliance is a shaky one, and the seams show clearly. The second story, in which Cross and his crew have to try to outsmart a crimelord who has taken one of their own captive, seems very much like what it is: A second story grafted into the first one's tale of mysterious murders coming to a head in a prison already boiling with racial tension. Both are told in Vachss' over-the-top pulp tough-guy prose, which doesn't work nearly as well here as it did when helping the career criminal Burke present his tough-guy face to the world. For Burke, the image was part of the affect and the face he showed the world to protect himself and those he loved. But with Cross and company, it's image with no substance behind it to care about. The mysterious entity or entities that are at the root of the killing are left unexplained; whether Vachss takes them up again in later Cross books is yet to be seen and makes the already retread-y Blackjack lose even more of its good will.
Cross and his mercenaries were great characters in small doses in several short stories Vachss collected over his career, but this version of their chronicles limps badly from the start and stumbles over its creator's sermonizing attitude and the incomplete revision and union of the source materials.
Original available here.
Blackjack borrows the story Vachss wrote for the Dark Horse comic book Predator: Race War in the early 1990s and tweaks it to remove references to the hunting alien made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1987 movie. He then combines it with a previously published short story about Cross's crew and ties them together rather loosely around some of the characters of the comic book adaptation.
The alliance is a shaky one, and the seams show clearly. The second story, in which Cross and his crew have to try to outsmart a crimelord who has taken one of their own captive, seems very much like what it is: A second story grafted into the first one's tale of mysterious murders coming to a head in a prison already boiling with racial tension. Both are told in Vachss' over-the-top pulp tough-guy prose, which doesn't work nearly as well here as it did when helping the career criminal Burke present his tough-guy face to the world. For Burke, the image was part of the affect and the face he showed the world to protect himself and those he loved. But with Cross and company, it's image with no substance behind it to care about. The mysterious entity or entities that are at the root of the killing are left unexplained; whether Vachss takes them up again in later Cross books is yet to be seen and makes the already retread-y Blackjack lose even more of its good will.
Cross and his mercenaries were great characters in small doses in several short stories Vachss collected over his career, but this version of their chronicles limps badly from the start and stumbles over its creator's sermonizing attitude and the incomplete revision and union of the source materials.
Original available here.
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