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Post by dem bones on May 24, 2011 16:49:52 GMT
William Hjortsberg - Falling Angel (Arrow 1980, 1987) Blurb "Terrific... I've never read anything like it" - STEPHEN KING
Harry Angel, of the Crossroads Detective Agency, has a new client and a new challenge. He is to track down Johnny Favorite, a famous crooner back before the war. Strafed in an air-raid, he was shipped home a mental zombie, and lodged in a private hospital upstate. Now, sixteen years later, his whereabouts has become a matter of vital concern to certain parties.
And Harry Angel is set to unravel a mystery devised in hell ...What with loads of wretched real life stuff going down these past months, i've had precious little time to take down notes on the little i've read which is a particular shame in the case of Falling Angel. For all i know there are a number of these detective - voodoo & black magic crossover novels, but i've not read any and it's doubtful they'd be as gripping as William Hjortsberg's masterpiece. Amnesiac Harry Angel's investigation into the disappearance of Johnny Favourite leads him into the dark and deadly world of powerful voodoo practitioners in post-WWII New York. Those few witnesses to Favourite's demise who offer Angel the least information are brutally murdered - to give you a taster, one poor bastard has a delicate part of his anatomy severed and rammed down his throat - and it soon becomes glaringly apparent that Angel is being targeted by a particularly deadly Houngan. It comes in at just short of 250 pages and once started, i burnt through it in one shot. What a chronic 'review' of a brilliant novel! let's hope somebody else has read it and can do it justice.
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Post by killercrab on May 24, 2011 17:27:49 GMT
This was the novel of the film Mickey Rourke starred in? Interesting...
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Post by andydecker on May 24, 2011 18:11:43 GMT
It is a great novel. And the movie is remarkably faithful to the novel.
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Post by markewest on Jul 26, 2011 23:48:05 GMT
Loved this and re-read it last year - my review, which I published at goodreads (if anyone's interested), is below:
In 1959 New York, Harry Angel is hired by the mysterious Louis Cyphre to track down Johnny Favourite, a crooner who’s been holed up in a hospital since the war. When Angel discovers that the singer is missing, everyone he speaks to on the trail to find Favourite ends up dead. And all the time, the mysterious Cyphre seems to pop up everywhere, not least haunting Harry’s dreams. A hard-boiled private detective novel, employing (and enjoying) every staple of that genre, this takes things into far darker territory as the novel goes on. Sticking to New York throughout (unlike the film), this often seems like it was written with a pang of nostalgia for the city of old and works all the better for it. The ending, as Harry attends a Black Mass in an abandoned subway station, is painful and bitter and unpleasant and serves as a real kick in the gut, before the final denouement. Having read this before (and seen the film a few times), I was surprised at how many obvious clues Hjortsberg seemed to drop at the start (and the cover art doesn’t help), but the clues got more insidious as it went on. This is a cracking novel, working perfectly as either a hardboiled thriller or a supernatural one, never afraid to lay on the violence and gore, but also treating the love affair between Harry and Epiphany with delicate ease. Very highly recommended.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Jul 27, 2011 6:44:30 GMT
Hi Mark!
Excellent! This has been on the shelves for years & recently I've been meaning to actually read it, especially as I've just finished a Hjortsberg SF novel, Gray Matters, which was quite barmy, all about humans living as brains in tanks inthe 25th century. I'll have to dig it out.
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Post by PeterC on Jul 27, 2011 13:13:03 GMT
Falling Angel is indeed a superb horror/thriller and the Sinatra-era New York setting is wonderfully presented. I'd like top echo Mark's comment about the clues in the story, because when I first read it I was totally gripped and mystified but when I re-read it a few years later I was amazed that I'd been so slow on the uptake! I can't say the film was very impressive, though. Switching the locale from fifties NY to the 'Deep South' may have kept costs down but it lost a huge part of the book's appeal. The film just doesn't have the same tension and intrigue as the book.
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Post by markewest on Jul 27, 2011 15:42:31 GMT
Hi John!
Good to see you here. Hjortsberg has written quite a wide variety of stuff (including "Legend" for Ridley Scott) but I've never actually read anything else of his.
Peter C - the film works for me, but as a generally separate entity. I watched it again just after re-reading the book and I was surprised that it has a fairly steady (not slow, as such, but often getting that way) pace.
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Post by stuyoung on Jul 27, 2011 17:02:05 GMT
The novel didn't do a lot for me as the twist seemed so obvious. Although I would be kind of curious to read the book again to see if I enjoy the PI angle more second time round.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 27, 2011 19:06:14 GMT
I picked up a second hand copy of this a few months ago, but haven't read it yet. I loved the film, though. Yes, it's a bit hokey and a little style-over-substance, but the atmosphere was incredible.
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Post by andydecker on Aug 2, 2011 8:09:03 GMT
Here is the cover of the german edition, which was done as a movie-tie in. Not very imaginative, but I liked it.
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Post by Dr Strange on Sept 14, 2021 13:23:51 GMT
Just picked up the sequel, Angel's Inferno (2020, No Exit Press), which I didn't even know existed. Big fan of the first book and the film, so have some trepidation about the whole thing. Blurb: 'WHEN THE DEVIL LAUGHS THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD LAUGHS WITH HIM'
A mind-bending thriller blending hard-boiled detective fiction, supernatural horror, and metaphysical noir that takes readers on a macabre journey into the occult, from the East Coast to Paris to the Vatican, as private investigator Harry Angel, seeking both answers about his true identity and revenge, hunts down Satan himself.
Here is the stunning sequel to the Edgar-nominated novel Falling Angel, the basis for the classic cult film Angel Heart, which also stands alone as a masterwork of noir suspense fiction.
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Post by andydecker on Sept 14, 2021 14:46:27 GMT
I know what you mean. I am also very sceptic about this. The first one and the movie didn't desparatedly needed a sequel, three years after the death of the writer is a long time for a publication, and again a niche publisher. Granted, his "pulp-edition" of classics with retro covers is a funny idea - Alice Cooper on Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll - but the rest is at best so-so. Seems the genre is ever more only for the lucky few.
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Post by Middoth on Sept 14, 2021 18:05:09 GMT
If you enjoy "Son of Rosemary", you will definitely enjoy it too.
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Post by Dr Strange on Sept 15, 2021 8:50:17 GMT
I've read the first 50 pages or so of Angel's Inferno now, and so far so good. The story is picked up exactly where the first book ends, with Angel in handcuffs in his apartment, surrounded by cops, and a horrifically murdered woman in his bed. It's no spoiler to say he manages somehow to escape, but I won't say how. By page 50, Angel is in Paris and starting his search for Louis Cyphre. I am enjoying it - it's a long time since I read Falling Angel, so direct comparisons are difficult, but it's certainly fast moving, and the only (minor) criticism I have is that the 1950s US hard-boiled tec slang is sometimes laid on a bit thick and difficult for me to follow (but then I've never read much hard-boiled stuff, or even much crime fiction generally). There's also a little bit of "padding", inasmuch as there is some recapping of what happened previously, but I suppose that is only to be expected given the 40+ years between the two books.
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Post by Dr Strange on Sept 15, 2021 22:27:22 GMT
About one third of the way through Angel's Inferno now, and still enjoying it. I'm not going to say much about plot developments, just a couple of more general observations. First, I am reminded very much of some of Dennis Wheatley's books, mainly because there is a lot of "factual" information that is dropped into the text, covering things like voodoo, gnosticism, the Dead Sea scrolls, and the prehistorical origins of religion. I know a lot of people don't really like this sort of thing in a novel - but it doesn't bother me if it isn't overdone, which I don't think it is here. The only other thing I am going to say here is that there have been a couple of interesting cameo appearances from real historical figures - Angel (who now accepts that he really is/was Johnny Favorite) first briefly bumps into Albert Camus in a Paris nightclub, and later ends up borrowing a book from William S. Burroughs (though he doesn't really know who either of these people are).
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