Good hard hitting covert action thriller. Huston is a sharp writer with a flair for words and I really enjoy reading his stuff. ( )

On balance, I’m already a Charlie Huston fan. My previous favorite book by Huston is Already Dead, which is a hard-boiled noir novel about vampires in the New York underground. I didn’t care for the rest of the trilogy quite as much, but Huston is high on the list of authors I enjoy.

I’m not sure why it took me so long to pick up Huston’s new book, Skinner, but I’m glad I did. The plot is “20 minutes into the future” stuff–really fresh allusions to recent events abound. But unlike almost every other recent novel about a dystopian future, there’s a liminal glow of hope. I am truly ready for a dystopia backlash, and Skinner has some of that energy along with underpinnings of optimism.

Skinner is very William Gibson-esque, in a good way. As a connoisseur of Gibson, I’d say Huston’s book isn’t early Gibson like Neuromancer–we don’t get that very often, and maybe that time has passed. It’s mid-Gibson: think Pattern Recognition. There’s even a character in Skinner that specializes in teasing out patterns from data like in Pattern Recognition.

What’s different from Gibson is the main character, Skinner, who was raised in a Skinner box. Because of his childhood, Skinner has several special skills, as well as a lot of emotional baggage. I’ll leave it at that. One other difference is that in recent books like Spook Country, I feel like Gibson spent most of the book building up to a single big finale. In contrast, Skinner has a pretty consistent number of fun ideas and action throughout the entire book.

I’d recommend Skinner if you like Gibson, Stephenson, or Swierczynski. And if you enjoy Skinner, you might enjoy The Informationist or Daniel Suarez or Ramez Naam. ( )

An autistic (handsome too!) hitman, and his "asset", a robot building, kung fu fighting uh, kung fu fighting robot builder, are on the lam from a private security company. No, several private security companies. And terrorists. And the C.I.A. For God knows what reason. Confusing, but well written and entertaining. It suffers a little from the thriller movie problem in which the previously thought to be invincible protagonist is captured then escapes due to the overconfidence and carelessness of his captor. Who (duh) should have put a bullet in him when he had a chance. It does have a lot to say about the notion of privacy and government secrecy and surveillance. Great plot twist at the end. ( )

Charlie Huston is one of my (many) favorite authors. He has a lean mean writing style that mostly gets out of the way of the story he wants to tell. His stories do a great job of twining several layers of plot in ways that are entertaining.

I'd say he hit the mark again here. I really enjoyed his primary idea, about how Skinner was raised and the extraordinary nuance Huston puts into so few flashback-y words. "Skinner's Maxim" is pure gold. The master coordinator and talent scout, Terrence, plays such a huge role for a character that gets so little screen time. And Jae was another fully fleshed out bizarre-talent person. Wonderful!

And then he weaves in a secondary plot, really more a theme, about "contraction" (not really a spoiler without any context). The secondary plot was more about military contractors.

Huston has a masterful touch with his minor supporting characters. Maker Smith, for example. I so appreciate how smoothly Huston sketches these sort of oddballs, using relatively few words.

I started to enjoy Skinner's foil, Haven, but I felt the plot was robbed. There had to be more scenes between those two. Perhaps they fell to the editing knife (X-Acto #28, lol)? And the final resolution between them, without spoiling it, was a lame joke compared to what I anticipated. It was fully intentional and I suspect it was Huston 'taking the piss' on us. Doesn't matter much as it was only a blemish on a solid 4-star canvas.

I've got one harsh complaint and that is the dialog. Huston's style is naturally sparse but too many characters' speech patterns were telegraphic. I can show what I mean by the following exchange between two characters (not an actual quote but darn close in some places) --

"Hello."
"Did you?"
"You know."
"Of course."
"So there we are."

It makes perfect sense for some characters, like Jae and Skinner, but it got annoying when it is everyone. It is too skeletal, too much of an affectation. This felt like some laziness on Huston's part, or where his ego and track record beat down some editor's suggestions.

I imagine Huston editing his dialog and trying to drop out as many words as he can without losing us entirely. There were times it felt like that.

There were places where the pacing was off. Very unusual for Huston. And it took some extra effort to get into the story, introducing the characters and how they relate to each other.

One last pet peeve. And I think Huston knows better than this one also. He interchangeably uses the words "magazine" and "clip" for the magazine of a pistol or rifle. Magazine is the one and only correct term. "Clip" belongs to the holding-a-gun-sideways and watching too many action movies aesthetic. I got the feeling Charlie made an intentional dig at pedantics like me because he uses "magazine" once or twice and then it goes all clippy.

This story is also dated strongly by some of the pop culture and world event references. It plays very well today but it might weaken this book for readers twenty years from now. Very minor nitpick.

I think if Huston repaired the dialog, didn't screw us with Haven's end, and fixed some pacing issues I might rate this as five stars. It is very good, to me, and if you like Huston's other works you'll probably like this one as well. But it doesn't have the "small" feel of his usual noir. This one rambles around the world. Maybe I also like his rants. ( )

Charlie Huston has a wonderful way of taking the familiar and adding something you weren't expecting. His vampire crime noir series as well as his last novel "Sleepless" are great examples of this. In the former Huston takes the dime novel detective genre and drops in dead into vampire mythology. And in the latter he gives us a police thriller set in a world that no longer sleeps. And his latest novel "Skinner" continues this trend by taking the stock spy thriller and adding to it a boy kept in a Skinner Box until he was 12, and then let him loose on the world. Huston keeps you guessing all the way to the end, and along the way touches on topics you weren't expecting. A great book by a great writer. ( )