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A review by batbones
The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno
3.0
Our worlds are so momentary. We are alone all our lives and then go off that way as well. (263)
"You found your way down here, and then...saw all this. You saw all of this and you couldn't find the answer. You couldn't find the answer because there was no answer for all this, was there?" (312)
A rather puzzling (and there are real puzzles including a cut-out decoder wheel), reader-helps-the-detective, genre-fluid mystery story that wraps up as a thoughtful meditation about depression, life's blank answer sheet, death and the death of childhood at the threshold of loss. The combination of a world lifted from a children's book, tending towards fantasy where villains have names such as Professor Von Golum and attempt to do really obvious things, with the horrors of the adult world, is erratic and unfortunately uneven. The whimsical quality instead threw the mordant aspects of the story off-kilter and made it less emotionally available to a reader who wanted very much to feel for the Boy Detective. One, with frustration, feels separated from him and what he is feeling; perhaps someone in a similar emotional state would be able to understand better. The beginning was not very gripping but it gets better and finishes off rather splendidly with a particular ghastly image that deserves its own surprising effects on potential readers. Hence the lack of a mention.
"You found your way down here, and then...saw all this. You saw all of this and you couldn't find the answer. You couldn't find the answer because there was no answer for all this, was there?" (312)
A rather puzzling (and there are real puzzles including a cut-out decoder wheel), reader-helps-the-detective, genre-fluid mystery story that wraps up as a thoughtful meditation about depression, life's blank answer sheet, death and the death of childhood at the threshold of loss. The combination of a world lifted from a children's book, tending towards fantasy where villains have names such as Professor Von Golum and attempt to do really obvious things, with the horrors of the adult world, is erratic and unfortunately uneven. The whimsical quality instead threw the mordant aspects of the story off-kilter and made it less emotionally available to a reader who wanted very much to feel for the Boy Detective. One, with frustration, feels separated from him and what he is feeling; perhaps someone in a similar emotional state would be able to understand better. The beginning was not very gripping but it gets better and finishes off rather splendidly with a particular ghastly image that deserves its own surprising effects on potential readers. Hence the lack of a mention.