Tangled Bookmarks

How I adore Chuck Wendig! There’s no flowers and unicorns and pretty rainbows and goodness in his worlds. His characters aren’t sweet and righteous and full of morals and ethics. Miriam Black, the “heroine” of his Miriam Black series (Blackbirds & Mockingbirds) is a strong female character…who is also not a particularly nice person. I certainly wouldn’t want to know her. Yet she is absolutely fascinating to read about.

And now we have Mookie Pearl – a thug, a criminal, a drug addict, an enforcer for a Mafia-type organization. And also a fairly crappy father.

Yet I want Mookie to win. I want to see Mookie come out on top, have a happy ending, repair his relationship with his angry late-teens daughter, Nora. Wendig has created this unlikeable character, and then made me like him. Go figure. Dunno how Wendig does it, but he’s a superstar at doing it. :D He’s a writer, someone who creates these horrible characters and sucks you in so deeply, you don’t want to come up for air.

Each chapter of The Blue Blazes has a passage by John Atticus Oakes – a character that we never meet, but the excerpts from his journals about his travels Below tell us a lot about the world Mookie Pearl inhabits. The Underground, the Below, the Beneath, the Underworld – that dark place where the demons and goblins live, and where you don’t want to go.

This is the third book by Chuck Wendig that I’ve read – and every one of them has been a 5 star for me. I love his writing, I love his broken characters, I love his style. Dark and gritty, with flashes of humour, there are still times when I shudder. You won’t find your cookie-cutter kick-arse heroine, saving the world, stuck in an InstaLuv love triangle here. You’ll find broken damaged people, who do things that aren’t nice, yet still feel yourself rooting for them to come out on top.

Only thing left to say – Mr Wendig, when’s the next Mookie Pearl adventure coming out???