A review by aksel_dadswell
He Died with His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond

4.0

I'd heard nothing but glowing praise for this 80's London-set noir (and the first in Raymond's Factory series), and it more than lived up to the hype. This is an incredibly bleak, muted, existential exploration of the dark, dirty characters inhabiting the book's grimy Thatcherite(?) London setting, laced with a heavy marbling of deadpan, black-as-pitch humour. So, bleak, dark, dirty, grimy, black - lots of pleasant happy adjectives that don't make me feel like a boiling hot shower afterwards. But even if I didn't have a fetish for this kind of grim and unrelenting narrative, it's so beautifully written that Raymond's prose elevates it to something much more than it could have been without the slippery poetic language. I cannot wait to sink into the rest of the books in this delicious series.