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Private Midnight: A Novel
Private Midnight: A Novel
Private Midnight: A Novel
Ebook381 pages6 hours

Private Midnight: A Novel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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“James Ellroy meets David Lynch in this addictive mix of noir and supernatural horror” from the acclaimed author of Zaneville and Enigmatic Pilot (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
 
Det. Birch Ritter is a man on the edge—of himself. His past is filled with secrets, guilt, and ghosts. And his latest case is about to lead him to Genevieve, a woman who claims that her business is shadows. The widow of a recently deceased real estate mogul, her grief isn’t entirely convincing. But she knows what lies between the darkness and the light inside men. And what she knows about Ritter is more than he can bear . . . and more than he can resist.
 
Private Midnight is a seductive story of grit, gunplay, vampirism, and a bit of bondage, all filtered through the mind of the “brilliantly illuminating” author and multimedia artist Kris Saknussemm (Alain de Botton, author of How Proust Can Change Your Life).
 
“Off-the-wall strange and surreal—and definitely not recommended as a Mother’s Day gift.” —Kirkus Reviews
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 3, 2015
ISBN9781468311891
Private Midnight: A Novel

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Rating: 3.5454545454545454 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Private Midnight is not a continuation of the Loadmania Testament. It is not a sequel, or prequel, to Zanesville, Kris Saknussemm’s debut novel. Private Midnight succeeds totally on its own merits. I think that shows the author is not a fluke, not a one trick pony, he can write in other styles, he has other stories to tell us, and he writes very well indeed.What does unite this story with the previous one is they are both totally bizarre departures from their expected paths. Without giving too much of the story away, a major portion of the plot is devoted to a hard-nosed male detective with some loose moral values and enough childhood trauma to make any psychiatrist very rich, Birch Ritter, being slowly transformed into Sunny, a decidedly un-male character.One of the more subtle changes in the book, in direct contrast to the dramatic change Birch Ritter goes through, is the language. At the beginning of the novel, the dialog is all crisp and filled with the usual detective story aphorisms and descriptions. As Sunny becomes the more dominant character, the language slowly softens and the observations become more subtle. You should not take this to mean that Sunny is a soft woman, no, far from it; she becomes a woman with a mission to fulfill. The author is to be applauded for such attention to detail.Private Midnight lacks the kick to the head, the “I’ve Never Read Anything Like This Before” feeling I got from Zanesville. Once I got over my disappointment of still not having the promised continuation of that trip, I found myself pulled deeply into the story and discovered it had some amazing quirks of its own that does indeed set it apart from a lot of other works out there. Once again, Saknussemm takes us places other authors only hint at. Philip K Dick comes close to probing the human psyche as deeply or asking about the definitions of the Self, but Saknussemm does it from a different direction.If you are a fan of gender bending literature, if you are not afraid to confront our dual natures, try it. If you like your detective and police stories more in line with the classic Raymond Chandler or Joseph Wambaugh mold, don’t bother. Fans of the weird should enjoy this.Overall, I’m going four stars plus some for this. Call it four and a half because it is a unique mashup of modern fantasy, eroticism and detective novel not quite like anything else out there.

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Private Midnight - Kris Saknussemm

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