Hot or Not | The Dirty Streets of Heaven

Remember when I went to America, and The Speculative Scotsman was host to a month's worth of guest posts?

Remember how one of the bloggers I asked to entertain you all in my absence smartly parlayed my gentle suggestions of more standard subject matter to talk, instead, about sex?

Justin Landon's tongue-in-cheek review of the best and worst sex scenes in contemporary fantasy fiction was a huge hit — both with me and mine and, according to the analytics, you and yours. It's sprung to mind whenever I've come across questionable erotic content since, so I thought the thing to do was to fold what is admittedly a touchy subject into a semi-regular series of features.

Beginning today, and continuing whenever I see something particularly filthy - say a sex scene that makes me wince - I'll run an installment of Hot or Not, wherein I ask exactly that. There will be abbreviated arguments, and evidence by way of brief excerpts from the texts in question, but the final decision is on your shoulders, folks. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to judge whether a specific sex scene is - you guessed it - hot... or not.

With which, we begin.

And what a corker we have to start with!

The Dirty Streets of Heaven is the first volume of Tad Williams' urban fantasy series starring one Bobby Dollar, an advocate for the Highest's interests on Earth. His daily bread is to represent the dead on their day of judgement: to make a case for the soul's salvation whilst his old adversary pleads for its eternal damnation.

But as the blurb of this headlong new novel insists, Bobby Dollar is far from your average angel, so he isn't above falling for a lovely lady... nor indeed an evil demon.

I've bolded a few of the best bits from Williams' description of this dodgy dalliance:

"I rolled over and wrestled her to the floor again, then began to lick and kiss and nibble my way from her face to her toes and back up again,stopping somewhere in the middle of the second traverse to nose my head between her things. She yanked down one of the flimsy curtains surrounding the bed and let it settle over us, then took an end of it and looped it slowly and lovingly around my neck, using it as a bridle to speed me up or slow me down as I indulged myself in her astonishing, wonderful wetness. I heard her cry out my name until even that last word disappeared into less articulate sounds. but as much as I loved the taste of her, the cold skin and the warm, salty damp, I couldn't wait long — in fact, I couldn't wait any longer. As she lay catching her breath I sat up between her thighs and began to position myself over her, but she was not going to let me do it, not yet. She rolled me onto my back, putting a finger over my mouth to silence my questions, and then squatted on her heels above me, teasing my hardness with her own silky softness, rubbing back and forth without allowing me to penetrate, until I was almost as desperate as in the most frightening moments of our struggle, with her knife pressed against my neck. Then, as if we still struggled, I suddenly summoned my remaining strength and wrestled her onto her back. This time I was the one who stabbed at her, and she was the one who gasped out a cry that sounded like agony. Cold, cold, her skin was so cold... but inside she was as hot as a furnace. I cried out then, too, shocked and amazed and overwhelmed that it could be like this — that anything could be like this." (pp.236-7)

As did I.

But wait, it gets better! Because the bearers of the aforementioned hardness, not to mention the astonishing, wonderful wetness our dear Dollar is so in awe of... well they decide to go at it again, as follows:

"'Ooh,' she said, reaching down and giving me a squeeze. 'It appears your chariot is no longer swinging low, Mr. Dollar.' Her voice dropped down to a husky rasp. 'What do you say, Wings? Would you like to... carry me home again?'" (p.239)

So bad. And yet so, so good! :D

There's your evidence, anyway. Now it falls to you folks to make the call: are these excerpts from The Dirty Streets of Heaven hot, or not?

Book Review | The Dirty Streets of Heaven by Tad Williams

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition 

Bobby Dollar isn't your average angel.

Sure, he takes the occasional trip to Heaven, but his job as an advocate - arguing the fate of the recently deceased - keeps him pretty busy on Earth, and he's more than happy to spend the rest of his time propping up the bar with his fellow immortals.

Until the day a soul goes missing, presumed stolen by the other side.

A new chapter in the war between heaven and hell is about to open. And Bobby is right in the middle of it, with only a desirable but deadly demon to aid him.

***

"This is not a will, but it is a last testament of sorts. [...] What I am about to relate will be unbelievable to many, if not most who hear of it. However, I can assure whoever is reading this that there is nothing wrong with my mind and that I have had proofs that have more than satisfied me of everything I set out here.

"Here is what I now know, which I have seen proved beyond the possibility of debate. There is life after death. The soul does exist without the body. And although most of the narrow, interfering rules of the world's organised religions are just as wrong as I always thought they were, when it comes to the basic facts I must admit that they were right and my fellow doubters and I were wrong. There is a Heaven and there is a Hell." (pp.284-5)

And over the course of genre fiction fixture Tad William's new novel, the first in a series of three, Earthbound angel Bobby Dollar will come into conflict with the forces of both. If he lives to tell the tale, his story is sure to be thrilling... but let's not count our chickens before the fun's even begun.

As what's known in the parlance as an advocate, Bobby's job, mandated from on high, is essentially to defend the dead, for every saint and every sinner shall have his or her judgement day. And on that day, representatives of both heaven and hell will come together, the better to squabble, like lawyers, over the souls of the dearly departed.

Once upon a time, however - for so this fast-paced urban fantasy fable goes - our angelic advocate and his eternal adversary arrive at the scene of an apparent suicide, only to find a startling absence where the late Edward Walker's soul should be. In the many millennia heaven and hell have warred with one another, this is an unheard-of complication, and the resulting shockwaves carry far above, and deep below.

That could be that, but as the blurb boasts, dear Dollar isn't your average angel, so when an insidious scent assails him during his debriefing - in fact something about this whole business smells rotten to Bobby - he goes to ground, puts the moves on an alluring demon queen, and wages a lone campaign against unknown forces, all on an instinct. You know... as you do.

So different is this from his usual epic fantasy fare that I dare say The Dirty Streets of Heaven is hardly recognisable as the work of Tad Williams, though it is not, strictly speaking, the author's first foray into urban fantasy. Published immediately before the four-volume Shadowmarch saga, The War of the Flowers was about one man's mid-life crisis by way of few good fairies and the creatures conspiring against them. In a certain sense, it was like The Never-Ending Story for a new generation — and if it isn't much remembered these seven years on, that's only because The War of the Flowers was then and continues criminally overlooked. It's a fantastic standalone, and if you haven't, you really should read it.

Of course, the more relevant question is whether you should take to The Dirty Streets of Heaven, but it bears repeating that Williams has been here before, or at least somewhere near. This time, however, he means business: almost everything of import occurs in the real world rather than the far-flung fairyland of The War of the Flowers. Indeed, Williams seems surprisingly disinterested in building another imagined kingdom, brick by individual brick.

Bobby certainly visits the titular city on a couple of occasions over the course of The Dirty Streets of Heaven, but both here and at his home away from home - which is to say a pub in the Port of San Judas, southwest of San Francisco - he dismisses almost every opportunity to talk about Heaven or Hell beyond the broad strokes. If it's not "none of your business" or "a story for some other time," it's "not exactly clear" or "hard to explain," and this does begin to frustrate. To properly appreciate The Dirty Streets of Heaven, we must imagine as much about Bobby Dollar's world, if not more, than we are ever informed of.

In terms of character, too, there's something slim about Williams' new novel. Bobby Dollar is a prototypical private eye: a noirish detective type with all the baggage such anti-heroes carry. He won't take a telling, his investigation becomes an obsession, his behaviour is otherwise rarely rational... then he falls head over heels for a femme fatale. And the Countess of Cold Hands isn't even "a woman. Maybe once upon a time, but not for a while. She's part of the ruling class of Hell — a demon, sworn to destruction and the perversion of everything good, and if she's helping you, it's because it suits her. Don't trust a single thing she says or does." (pp.225-6)

That said, a little self-awareness along these lines goes a long way, and eventually Williams' simplistic characterisation gives way to greater depth, if not complexity, as we progress down The Dirty Streets of Heaven. In the interim, Williams moves the conspiracy-driven plot along at a very reasonable rate, punctuating its conversational narration with a wealth of witty interplay between Bobby and his not entirely angelic associates. The action is terrific too, and what with all the monsters and men on our protagonist's path, there's certainly no shortage of that.

At the end of the day, The Dirty Streets of Heaven is a little on the thin side, both figuratively and literally, but for as long as it lasts, it's fine fun. If you've ever read a John Connolly novel, or the Sandman Slim series, you're apt to find it slightly overfamiliar, yet even then the similarities are initial and more importantly superficial. Once Williams finds his feet, and by the end he has, The Dirty Streets of Heaven stands as compelling as any of its many contemporaries, such that its slated sequels - Happy Hour in Hell and Sleeping Late on Judgement Day - will be required reading for this critic.

***

The Dirty Streets of Heaven
by Tad Williams

UK Publication: September 2012, Hodder & Stoughton
US Publication: September 2012, DAW

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition 

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