‘The Bloodstained Man’ – Christopher Rowley (Tor)

I wasn’t all that keen on Christopher Rowley’s ‘Pleasure Model’ but somehow found myself going back for a second helping with ‘The Bloodstained Man’. I guess the bottom line is that the morning commute to work just isn’t the time or place for anything too highbrow. Something that will keep me awake is what I’m after, I want explosions described so well that you can almost hear them!
The problem is though, I also want some kind of story to go with the spectacle and ‘Pleasure Model’ didn’t deliver on that score. Is it even possible for a pulp novel to be too ‘pulpy’? That’s certainly the impression I got with Rowley’s first offering in this series. I found myself back for more though and I got pretty much what I was expecting...

Detective Rook Venner, Mistress Julia and the gene grown human Plesur are on the run from government troops that want to kill them and a shadowy organisation that wants the information in Plesur’s head. If only Venner knew what this information actually meant...
The only option for our heroes seems to be to hide out in the flooded New Jersey territories but they’re about to find that this particular hiding place is even more dangerous than what they had left behind. Separated from each other, Venner finds himself an unwilling contestant in gladiatorial games while Julia finds herself at the mercy of a gangster with only one thing on his mind. Both of them need to get themselves out of trouble before Plesur lands even further in it...

As I said at the start, is it possible for a pulp novel to be too ‘pulpy’? If it gets in the way of the story then I’d say that the answer is a resounding yes. And that’s what we get over the course of ‘The Bloodstained Man’.
There is plenty of style on display here, all skilfully rendered by Rowley. If you’re not getting shootouts that look effortlessly cool then you’re up against sex scenes that skirt the edges of decency (just enough for you to get that sense of the degrading but no more). You could almost be watching a film here instead of reading a book, a feeling that is sadly emphasised by Justin Norman’s slapdash approach to the interior art this time round. When Norman’s good he’s really good. At other times though, it feels more like he’s rattling off some quick storyboard art instead. The difference in quality really does show... The bottom line though is that ‘The Bloodstained Man’ is a slick affair that moves forward at a nice pace.

Having a lot of style is all well and good but I came away feeling like there was nothing of substance to back things up. There’s a mystery in the background, waiting to be solved, but it doesn’t get a chance to come to the fore as people are too busy looking cool and blowing stuff up. With such a key and integral part of the plot relegated to the background there’s nothing left to give the book any real structure. What we’re left with is a confusing series of events that propel our characters towards a finale that the author hasn’t deemed important enough to be given much (if any) airtime...

The characters get the same kind of treatment. As was the case with ‘Feed’ (reviewed yesterday); Venner, Plesur and co are too busy conforming to various pulp tropes for the reader to get a real picture of who they actually are. I know this is a pulp novel but surely that doesn’t mean that the characters can’t take on their own identity as well as being hard-bitten, glamorous yet vulnerable and so on...
When I start to feel that a character could be anyone (with no real identity of their own) that’s when I start to lose interest and I don’t think the whole ‘pulp’ excuse really cuts it...

‘The Bloodstained Man’ isn’t really the second part of a trilogy as such and, having read the first book, I’d say that what we’re looking at here isn’t really a trilogy at all. What we’re getting here feels more like one large book that has been split into three smaller parts. The two books flowed nicely into one another but with no cliff-hanger as such. There’s more of a cliff-hanger, at the end, than there was last time round but there still wasn’t that sense of urgency that would have set things up nicely for the finale. It was more a case of ‘I know what will happen next so I’m not too worried about it...’ As was the case with ‘Pleasure Model’, ‘The Bloodstained Man’ plays to its pulp roots so heavily that you can more or less predict what will happen next (although I’m willing to be proved wrong!) With only one book left I’ll probably finish the series but I’m not invested in it at all. Having three distinct books might have given the plot some much needed impetus but the complacent way that the first two have flowed into one another robbed the series of the urgency that it needed.

In the great battle between style and substance, ‘The Bloodstained Man’ came out firmly in favour of style. What was a victory for style though felt like a bitter defeat for the story itself. It may be too late for the trilogy but I’m hoping that things pick up for the final chapter...

Six out of Ten