Tripwire Reviews Criminal Macabre The Complete Stories

A Slice Of Noir

Tripwire’s contributing writer Laurence Boyce reviews Criminal Macabre: The Complete Stories by Steve Niles…

Criminal Macabre – The Complete Cal McDonald Stories
Writer: Steve Niles
Dark Horse

With 30 Days of Night being perhaps Steve Niles best known and breakout work, it’s unsurprising that his creation Cal McDonald ploughs a similarly ghoulish furrow. But whilst the former often favoured dark introspection, there’s a vein (no pun intended) of insouciance that runs throughout the adventures of McDonald. While his adventures are reminiscent in tone of the likes of classic noir detectives as Mike Hammer and Sam Spade, his antagonists are less Maltese Falcons and more German Nosferatu. Those who have enjoyed the comic book adventures of MacDonald will know how Niles enjoys playing with the conventions of the detective genre and marrying them to many of the outré elements of supernatural horror. With Criminal Macabre – The Complete Cal McDonald Stories Niles indulges his noir tendencies in prose form.

The collection begins with novella Savage Membrane which will establish the beats of the character for the rest of the stories. Given that we begin with the fact that McDonald wakes up with little memory of what had happened the night before, we can tell that he is basically a walking disaster area, a walking cocktail of booze and drugs for whom a state of sobriety is a rare as a blood moon. But if you saw monsters 24/7 then perhaps you’d be forgiven for being off your face for much of the time.

Soon he and his constant companion Mo’Lock (a undead ‘ghoul’ who – like his brethren – tend to be unnoticed by the majority of humanity) are investigating the deaths of a number of people whose murders are reminiscent of a serial killer that McDonald has tangled with before. With an investigation that leads him down an increasingly dark – and gory – rabbit hole, McDonald is going to need more than a couple of bottles to get through everything.

Savage Membrane rattles along at a cracking pace with a number of bloody set pieces in which Niles often utilises the prose of the likes Spillane and Chandler, veering between quick, clean and precise and darkly humorous. In this world, death is cheap and quick but a hangover “… sounded like a hammer against a steel barrel inside my skull.” McDonald himself is the typical protagonist of these stories – FUBAR but strangely relatable at the same. While there’s always an underlying sense of despair that runs through many of the stories – side characters will often die gruesomely, and more often than not, forgotten – there’s something almost admirable in his sheer determined nihlism in the face of the absurd and – of course- he’s often given the best and darkly funny lines. There is a perhaps more than a touch of John Constantine, with the Liverpudlian wit replaced by an American brashness.

Later stories – which as the collection goes on, get much shorter but add even more pace – play with more genre staples. Guns, Drugs and Monsters does pretty much what it says on the tin, with McDonald relocating to California and becoming involved with vampires whilst waiting for the postal service to deliver him a talking head in a box. An aquatic beastie will turn up as does a werewolf fighting against his nature in fun pieces of work whilst ‘All My Bloody Things’ has an air of Stephen King as even McDonald finds little to laugh about when facing a true monster

For horror fans (and adventurous noir fans), Criminal Macabre – The Complete Cal McDonald Stories proves an exceedingly fun collection of stories. While the whole ‘Noir Supernatural Detective’ would seem to be a match-up ripe for exploitation, it’s surprising it’s not really been done.  With a tight turn of phrase and tounge often in cheek (though sometimes ripped out in a nasty and bloody way) Niles clearly is having as much as we are. Well, all of us apart from Cal.

Criminal Macabre – The Complete Cal McDonald Stories is out now in paperback from Dark Horse