Blackbirds

[sawyl]

Over the weekend I freed up some time to catch up on a spot of reading in the form of Chuck Wendig's Blackbirds, which I rather enjoyed.

Miriam Black is a woman with a gift. Or possibly a curse. With a touch she can tell how and when someone will die. Drifting along on the fringes of society, living on the credit cards of the newly dead, she happens to hitch a lift with a truck driver, Louis, who, she quickly discovers, has little over a month left until his violent death. And when he dies, the last word to leave his mouth will be her name.

Determined to give fate the slip just this once, Miriam flees from Louis and stumbles into the not-so-tender mercies of Ashley Gaynes, an over-confident young con-artist who has yet to realise that he is caught up in something big. But fate won't let Miriam go easily and the more she struggles to escape, the more events keep bringing her back to Louis and death in the lantern room of an unknown lighthouse.

Alongside the main plot, Blackbirds establishes Miriam's backstory with a series of interludes. Some of these take the form o an interview with a wannabe journalist, interested in establishing the nature of her talent and how she is prevented from intervening by the iron rules of fate. Others take the form of series of macabre dreams in which Miriam argues with a copy of Louis, either a figment of her subconscious or possibly a genuine version of something more supernatural, about her past and her inability to change the future. Cleverly, Wendig holds back on some of the details of each interlude, letting it spin out over time so that they pack a punch when the final moments twist round and bite back.

Although Miriam isn't the most sympathetic of characters — Louis tells her, with some cause, that she's a lot like the child in The Exorcist — she has a knack for swearing, a gift for catchy and truly unpleasant similes, and like most urban fantasy heroines, she's able to take a terrific amount of punishment and still get up and ride to the rescue or, possibly, to her doom — because one of the snags of Miriam's power is that she can't foresee her own death.

Blackbirds is a enjoyable and macabre fantasy, which starts with very little in the way of the fantastic and gradually builds up as Miriam encounters one supernatural thing after another. So by the time Ingersoll has revealed the history of witchcraft in his family and after she has had a shocking encounter with a genuine road-side psychic and once her nightmares have started revealing things that conscious!Miriam doesn't know, it becomes clear that Kansas is now just a speck in the rearview mirror and the book is deep into urban fantasy territory.