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bishopjoey's review
4.0
A follow-up of sorts to 2011's American Monsters, Crime Rave opens the day that novel's climactic explosion destroys the site of a huge rave and takes the lives of 30,000+ party-goers. (It makes no difference if you haven't read the first - all the background you need from the original story is pulled into this one.) Detectives Red Feather and Gunn are dispatched from the LAPD to interview a dozen survivors at a hospital in Beverly Hills. Simple enough save that two of the survivors are escaped from a heavily militarised alien research foundation (in Roswell, natch), so the leader of that crew is roped into the action. Throw in a wealthy baroness who blackmails the politicians she bankrolls and has a few skeletons of her own in the closet, a reincarnation of the classic Blob, and a coterie of gods from a new mythology and you have a compelling new addition to the genre of supernatural horror.
The survivors of the event are the heroes of the story and we learn, in the course of the police interviews, that they've survived far more than than the attacks of the previous night, but with enhanced capabilities.
Whereas American Monsters was a meditation from the front lines of 'the culturally entrenched misogyny wars' (as one Amazon reviewer put it), Koelher takes the themes of victimhood and female empowerment into more straightforward and more balanced territory. She makes it clear that it's the uses of power that corrupt or heal, whether it's the physical power of the rapist, the hard power of a military organisation, or the evil of an ascendant goddess seizing control. The contrasts she creates between the antagonists and her survivors who are each coming into their own powers makes for an engaging and thought-provoking read. The late 90s Los Angeles setting enables Koelher to capture a certain American decadence before the War on Terror turned things rather upside down.
Disclaimer: In addition to sharing pages with her in the collection Red Phone Box, I'm also a friend of the author. She's well cool.
The survivors of the event are the heroes of the story and we learn, in the course of the police interviews, that they've survived far more than than the attacks of the previous night, but with enhanced capabilities.
Whereas American Monsters was a meditation from the front lines of 'the culturally entrenched misogyny wars' (as one Amazon reviewer put it), Koelher takes the themes of victimhood and female empowerment into more straightforward and more balanced territory. She makes it clear that it's the uses of power that corrupt or heal, whether it's the physical power of the rapist, the hard power of a military organisation, or the evil of an ascendant goddess seizing control. The contrasts she creates between the antagonists and her survivors who are each coming into their own powers makes for an engaging and thought-provoking read. The late 90s Los Angeles setting enables Koelher to capture a certain American decadence before the War on Terror turned things rather upside down.
Disclaimer: In addition to sharing pages with her in the collection Red Phone Box, I'm also a friend of the author. She's well cool.
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