Shooting Star/Spiderweb by Robert Bloch
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Sometimes I get a craving for mac n cheese, and I mean, nothing fancy. Just a box, a boil, a stir, and eat it straight out of the pot. Fiction can be like that too. Sometimes I just want to read. A plot, some characters, an ending. Nothing too complicated or meaningful.
These Hard Case Crimes reprints are starting to fulfill that need. That need for a few hours of reading, that need to actually finish a book. I’m like a lot of you. I start way more books than I finish. If my eyes are too big for my stomach at the buffet, I guess my brain is too big for my pocket watch at the bookstore.
Don’t like the metaphors? Don’t read Hard Case Crime books. Don’t read Robert Bloch’s Shooting Star/Spiderweb (it’s two novels in one binding). Not that he’s given, as such, to these kinds of metaphors. But cheesy writing? You know how we like to make fun of an over stylize the mannerisms and speech patterns of certain time periods? Talk about cheesy. But I’m pretty sure, at the time of original publication date, Bloch was one-hundred percent sincere.
But that was then and I read this in the now. Cartoonish characters, implausible scenarios, a plot taking out of Plotto. And imagery that, I’m sure, was supposed to make the reader queasy, nervous, scared: titillated. Nowadays it borders on camp.
And yet, for all that: an okay box of mac n cheese. I’m not going to say “fun” or “good,” because, when the pot is empty, resting on my protruding belly in my chair, I can’t say I had fun and I don’t exactly feel good. But the craving’s been satisfied. The book’s done it’s job. That’s always can ever ask of pulp fiction.