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Crossing genres, however, isn't itself a recipe for success, and while Broken Land keeps its blurb's promise of mentioning a variety of pop culture things "From Buster Keaton to Arthur Rimbaud" and "hip hop to the madness of art", if I like steak and chocolate it does not follow that I would like a choc coated steak, and the more a book is about everything the more it is about nothing.
The other gripe I have with this story is that if it's a style parody of noir, it doesn't engage with its source material enough. Roger Rabbit was a good parody of a noir mystery while also a good noir mystery, but although the main character in Broken Land is a "wanna-be sleuth" the mystery feels like it gets solved without him in a burst of exposition at the end. And while he has dysfunctions like any good noir antihero - for instance his refusal to get a real paying job even if he has to break the law to make rent - they never seem to cause him problems in a way that propels the story forward. He picks a fight with a stranger, but seems to get along with major characters too well, which makes the lack of quotation marks in the dialogue feel appropriate as it's all clearly written by the same person.
That person is a gifted writer, with some fascinating ideas like blocked writers allowing ghosts to possess them in order to get inspiration, and some really wonderful turns of phrase like "I had lost the power of speech. I was trapped in a silent film where nothing was black and white." The power of words is clearly with John Biscello, but his kitchen sink approach of throwing every idea and pop culture reference at his disposal into a novel that parodies a plot-driven genre without offering much of a plot was not working for me, so I can't recommend this book as a whole.
I rate this book two out of four stars.
***
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