Reviews - Black Wings Has My Angel

You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.

131 reviews for:

Black Wings Has My Angel

Elliott Chaze

4.08 AVERAGE

heaneyy's review

4.5

dark reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

cifhyb's review

3.75

dark tense fast-paced

doramac's review

4.0

adventurous challenging dark medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Diverse cast of characters: No

amygeek's review against another edition

5.0

This book was published back in the 50s I think. Read about it online & they highly recommended it. It is the book version of film noir -in the very best way. Great story, interesting characters. I definitely recommend it.

roam_roam's review

4.75

adventurous dark mysterious fast-paced

“A fly strutted around the rim of my empty glass, a purplish fly with a back that changed color like the plumes in a rooster's tail. Those things come back especially sharp, clearer than the way she looked or the way I felt.” -p.24~25

“And at the same time I kept comparing the rocks and the sky with what we have down South and kind of gloating to think that the South, though lacking in chamber-of-commerce promotion, has the subtlest colors and teasingest smells a man could want. Out West all the smells are sucked up out of the baked land by the sun. And it's as if all the colors in the ground are gobbled up by their sunsets, and so is the blue of the sky. The sky is high and pale and impersonal and you get the feeling it doesn't belong to you at all, but that it is the property of the chamber of commerce. In the South the sky is humid and low and rich and it's yours to smell and feel. In the West you're only an observer. In the West someone sees a flower growing on a mountain and he writes a whole damned pamphlet about it. In the South the roses explode out of the weeds in the yards of the poorest shanties. Blood red ones. And pink ones—pink as that new girdle. Nature or no nature, the girdle was the thing.” -p.31~32

“After all, no matter how long you live, there aren't too many really delicious moments along the way, since most of life is spent eating and sleeping and waiting for something to happen that never does. You can figure it up for yourself, using your own life as the scoreboard. Most of living is waiting to live. And you spend a great deal of time worrying about things that don't matter and about people that don't matter and all this is clear to you when you know the very day you're going to die.” -p.35

“So when I'm reeling off the things I've done and haven't done, ‘way back in my head, I take that night in Pueblo and look at it over and over; the way you'll go to a movie you like, catching it at two or three different houses to see if it is as good as you thought the first time.” -p.35~36

“I'm telling this the way I remember it, and I explained to you before that some of the things that come back to me are little things that stick out of the story like sore thumbs and don't serve any useful purpose. I'm trying to keep it true to life and real life is not a series of nice interlocking ripples graded for size and fitting into a pattern that can be called off like your ABC's. It's a bunch of foolish tiny things that don't add one way or the other, except that they happened and passed the time.” -p.61~62

“It seems that when you're rich you do a lot of waiting for night, since daylight is neither sophisticated nor secretive and is more or less devoted to perspiring and recovering.” -p.138

“You've never heard a siren until you've heard one looking for you and you alone. Then you really hear it and know what it is and understand that the man who invented it was no man, but a fiend from hell who patched together certain sounds and blends of sounds in a way that would paralyze and sicken. You sit in your living room and hear a siren and it's a small and lonesome thing and all it means to you is that you have to listen until it goes away. But when it is after you, it is the texture of the whole world. You will hear it until you die. It tears the guts out of you like a drill against a nerve and it moves into you and expands. I'm glad I'll never have to listen to another siren. I'm glad no one will ever hunt for me again and that I'm finished with running and hearing them hunt me.” -p.157~158

"’Baby, just about anywhere you die there's somebody watching. It doesn't make any difference whether they're watching you die in bed or in a chair, somebody's going to be there. It's strictly a spectator sport.’” -p.186

“The ultimate in horror is, for some unworldly reason, attractive. Hypnotic. For this reason you stare at the face of a leper at Carville. You are riveted at the scene of an automobile smash-up. You may loathe high places and leap irresistibly into the very space that fills you with nausea. A man terrified of snakes may spend hours watching the green metallic head of the python in the cage.” -p.197