ANGELS is an frenetic, bruising, mind-tilting ride through bonkersville and man it's a blast. Can't give anything away, but I'd strongly advise reading the first two novels in the Coleridge series then grabbing ANGELS on release day and settling in for the show.

I really don't want to spoil anything so I'll keep it to myself but if you want your crime noir dipped in black horror honey with a slice of supernatural hijinks on the side then this is your jam.

This was a well written story that kept me interested until the end. I will give the author kudos for making this series enjoyable without having read the previous titles in the series.

WORSE ANGELS: An Isaiah Coleridge Novel
Laird Barron
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
ISBN-13: 978-0593084991
Hardcover
Thriller/Horror

Laird Barron is extremely well known in horror/dark fantasy circles. He has over the course of some two decades received multiple accolades for his shorter fiction and collections of the same. Barron has over the past few years turned his hand to what are known as full-length works (though, if a short story tells the full story, isn’t that full-length too? Just asking). Barron has been slowly constructing an ongoing story arc involving a private investigator named Isaiah Coleridge. The newly published WORSE ANGELS is the third and by far the best of these, a book that straddles the detective and horror genres to great effect.

WORSE ANGELS builds upon its predecessors, BLOOD STANDARD and BLACK MOUNTAIN. Barron drops enough info-nuggets throughout WORSE ANGELS to ensure that new readers aren’t lost at sea, though such folks will more than likely want to duck back to see what they have missed. Coleridge has an interesting background. The short version is that he is a onetime mob enforcer who has evolved, if you will, into a private investigator in upstate New York. While he handles the humdrum cases that one might expect he also on occasion finds himself involved in something more interesting. So it is that Coleridge is retained by a shady ex-cop who is a few days away from either cuffs or a coffin, depending on his luck. He retains Coleridge to investigate the death of his nephew four years earlier on the site of a now-defunct Supercollider project. The case was officially ruled a suicide to the satisfaction of everyone except for Coleridge’s client and his sister, the mother of the deceased. Coleridge takes his occasional partner Lionel Robard in tow to investigate the very cold trail. They encounter very strong resistance from some very strange individuals on behalf of some very powerful people with a vested interest in keeping things the way they are until they can control the outcome. There are also some deadly supernatural forces at work behind the scene, with the result being something akin to Philip Marlowe encountering the minions of the Cthulhu mythos. Coleridge, as demonstrated repeatedly in WORSE ANGELS and its predecessors, more often than not gets the snot beaten out of him repeatedly in these encounters, but somehow gives better than he gets and, thanks to doctors, duct tape, and antibiotics, lives to fight another day. The same, however, is true of his adversaries, who doubtless will continue to manifest themselves in future installments of this series even as Coleridge continues to stand in their way. It is here where the true meat of the Coleridge series in general and WORSE ANGELS in particular lays. The bad guys in WORSE ANGELS are extremely interesting, the stuff of nightmares interesting. They are the type of people who are just unsettling enough in the vibe they give up that you would walk across the street --- or move to another neighborhood --- if you encountered them, even though they appear to be perfectly normal (whatever that might be these days). It’s one of two neat tricks that Barron pulls off quite well.

What is the other neat trick? It is here that we pause for just a moment and briefly discuss the flaw of WORSE ANGELS. Coleridge’s interior first-person narrative tends at times to prattle on for just a bit too long. Note the qualifier “at times,” because just when you think that Barron through Coleridge is veering off of the narrative highway into the weeds --- there are times at which he seems to think that he’s on Facebook --- he comes up with the most memorable sentences and passages. We’re talking underlining/highlighting/writing in the notebook lines, the ones that other authors will be using for epigraphs in their own stories. It is this quality alone --- the second “neat trick” --- that makes WORSE ANGELS worth reading and recommending while we await the next installment, and, hopefully, the return of some of the nightmares we meet herein.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
© Copyright 2020, The Book Report, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on May 26, 2020

Isaiah Coleridge was a more interesting character during the previous two books in this series, when he was still a mob enforcer. As an enlightened thug, he had a unique personality. Now that he’s a private detective, he’s just another private detective, albeit one with a colorful background. He has gone straight to prove to himself and everyone else that he can follow a better path, which stops just short of being self-righteous. Fortunately, he hasn’t crossed that line. He wants to kick the dopamine rush that comes from hitting people, but he regularly encounters people that try to hit him, so what choice does he have? His thuggish instincts are still at war with his better nature, and every now and then his worse angel allows barely controlled mayhem to rule. He proves that late in the novel by assuring that some troublesome people will never make trouble again. That’s the Coleridge of old.

My ultimate issue with Worse Angels is not that Coleridge has gone soft — by the end of the novel, it is clear that he is still a wrecking ball — but that the plot veers in the direction of the supernatural. With the exception of John Connolly, I prefer my thriller writers to stay grounded in reality. Granted, there might be non-supernatural explanations for certain phenomenon, but they are about as plausible as gaining the ability to climb walls after being bitten by a radioactive spider.

Coleridge is improbably well read for a thug. In addition to summoning “the literary specters of Holmes and Mason; Poirot and Fletcher,” he quotes ancient Greeks and is familiar with history and mythology and philosophy. At least he has something to talk about. Unlike the thriller protagonists who describe their weapons in loving detail before running out of conversation, Coleridge ponders the mystery of existence, including the knowledge that all we have is “that fragile guttering flame between us and the endless void.” I probably like him because, despite his dark nature, he is good to dogs, only kills jerks, and detests the “righteous racism craze” that is “sweeping the nation.” For a hit man, he isn’t all bad.

Coleridge is hired by an ex-NYPD cop named Badja Adeyemi who worked as an assistant and bodyguard to Sen. Gerald Redlick, owner of a real estate business called the Redlick Group. The corporation laundered dirty Russian money. Adeyemi expects to be killed by Russian gangsters or arrested by the feds. Before that can happen, he hires Coleridge to look into the death of his nephew, Sean Pruitt, who was working on the Jeffers Large Particle Collider Project, an expensive and corrupt endeavor in which Redlick invested. Pruitt supposedly committed suicide by plunging down a shaft, but Adeyemi thinks there is a connection between that death and eight fatal accidents that occurred before construction came to a halt.

The first half of the novel drags a bit as Coleridge investigates the death with his associate Lionel Robard. The story take a strange turn when he encounters the Mares of Thrace, which seems to be a cult consisting of members who eat spoiled meat and dress like they are still in high school. The members become weirdly powerful when they make strange faces, perhaps owing to radiation, hence the Spiderman reference. None of that made much sense to me. The plot thread struck me as an unwelcome departure from the more reality-based stories Laird Barron told in the first two Coleridge books.

To be fair, I was feeling distracted when I read Worse Angels. I’m conscious of the fact that my mood affects my reading. Maybe Worse Angels is just as good as the earlier novels in the series and if I’d read it in a different week, I would have been more enthused. And to be fair, when the action picked up in the second half, I was drawn into the story. If nothing else, Barron’s sharp-edged prose is enough to keep me hooked on the series. I nevertheless hope the next book returns to the standard set by the first two.

RECOMMENDED

Worst Angels(Isaiah Coleridge #3)by Laird Barron- Known mostly for dark horror, this is the third outing for his half-Maroi reformed mob enforcer(thug!) turned PI. After leaving the Alaskan mob under a cloud and forcibly relocated in upstate New York, Isaiah begins a more simple life as a private detective only to find out life is never that simple. Here he is tasked by a retired cop, who was evil incarnate on the force, and asked to look in on the recent suicide of his nephew. Of course there are questions about the death, about the victim, and about the slip-shod investigation that closed it. Isaiah travels to Horsehead, NY, where everything is dark and creepy and people will do everything in there power to keep it that way. At once there is a cloud of menace hanging over Coleridge's head, and though he recognizes its danger, he can't help but intrude. The byplay is the thing here, dialog between Isaiah and just about everyone he meets. Not ordinary PI punch lines, but literary responses filled with demons, dragons, and history. Sometimes a bit verbose, but exceptionally entertaining. Thank you Netgalley for the ARC and a different detective read.