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antonism's review
5.0
5 / 5
A Drink Before We Die is a short story by Daniel Polansky, taking place in the same place as his Low Town series. The main character of the story is the same as in Low Town but the reader is not required to have read the series first. In fact, this short story can serve perfectly as an introduction to Polansky and his amazing trilogy.
Polansky is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. His prose is full of swag, wit and quotable lines. His style is so enjoyable that it's a pleasure to read and I found myself smiling often, thinking to myself that the line I had just read was so f***ing cool.
The plot is about the Warden and how he deals with a shady new group trying to get in on his turf and kick him out of business and out life along with it. The Warden is not really a likeable character nor a relatable one but his hard-boiled style and stoicism is immediately absorbing and attracting. The way Polansky recounts and gives us the story through the Warden's point of view and monologues often feels like a tug and push: something directly related to what is happening like an action or dialogue or similar, usually followed by a philosophical introversion or a humorous quip. This slows the pace a bit but it makes the reading experience much richer.
In summary, I loved this short story as much as I loved his Low Town series. Polansky's style and voice is incredible and you should do yourselves a favor and give him a chance, possibly starting with this one. Highly recommended!
5 / 5
A Drink Before We Die is a short story by Daniel Polansky, taking place in the same place as his Low Town series. The main character of the story is the same as in Low Town but the reader is not required to have read the series first. In fact, this short story can serve perfectly as an introduction to Polansky and his amazing trilogy.
Polansky is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. His prose is full of swag, wit and quotable lines. His style is so enjoyable that it's a pleasure to read and I found myself smiling often, thinking to myself that the line I had just read was so f***ing cool.
The plot is about the Warden and how he deals with a shady new group trying to get in on his turf and kick him out of business and out life along with it. The Warden is not really a likeable character nor a relatable one but his hard-boiled style and stoicism is immediately absorbing and attracting. The way Polansky recounts and gives us the story through the Warden's point of view and monologues often feels like a tug and push: something directly related to what is happening like an action or dialogue or similar, usually followed by a philosophical introversion or a humorous quip. This slows the pace a bit but it makes the reading experience much richer.
In summary, I loved this short story as much as I loved his Low Town series. Polansky's style and voice is incredible and you should do yourselves a favor and give him a chance, possibly starting with this one. Highly recommended!
5 / 5
auri_underthing's review against another edition
Well written but not quite my vibe.
cathepsut's review
4.0
Common wisdom affirms against the drinking of whiskey during daylight hours, and while I can see the merits of the argument, it is not one to which I hold.
Good first sentence. I did not expect a first person narrative.
Very stark prose. Intrigue. Violence. Interesting. I might check out that trilogy.
Good first sentence. I did not expect a first person narrative.
Very stark prose. Intrigue. Violence. Interesting. I might check out that trilogy.
peterseanesq's review against another edition
5.0
Please give me a helpful vote at Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/review/R1SEX3SJUSDNOT/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
This is a Tor.com short story, which means that it offers a taste of a much larger novel or universe published by Tor. Often time Tor.com short stories are far too cryptic to tell a story and rely totally on the reader already knowing the universe, the characters and the backstory.
This short story, however, works as a short story. It tells the story of "the Warden," who is the chief gang leader, although he doesn't really seem to have a gang, in an impoverished part of a fantasy city called "Lowtown." The setting is patterned on a film noir "naked city" setting, like many of the "fantasy noir" stories since Glen Cook pioneered the concept with his "Garrett, PI" stories. At least, I think it is a fantasy setting. I didn't see magic, but there were plenty of knives, maces and swords, but not a revolver in sight.
In this story, the Warden has to deal with an attempted hostile take-over of his territory by a gang operating in an adjacent low rent district.
Is he successful? Well, he has a Machiavellian approach to life and is nasty quick with a shiv, but to find out, you will have to read the story.
This is a Tor.com short story, which means that it offers a taste of a much larger novel or universe published by Tor. Often time Tor.com short stories are far too cryptic to tell a story and rely totally on the reader already knowing the universe, the characters and the backstory.
This short story, however, works as a short story. It tells the story of "the Warden," who is the chief gang leader, although he doesn't really seem to have a gang, in an impoverished part of a fantasy city called "Lowtown." The setting is patterned on a film noir "naked city" setting, like many of the "fantasy noir" stories since Glen Cook pioneered the concept with his "Garrett, PI" stories. At least, I think it is a fantasy setting. I didn't see magic, but there were plenty of knives, maces and swords, but not a revolver in sight.
In this story, the Warden has to deal with an attempted hostile take-over of his territory by a gang operating in an adjacent low rent district.
Is he successful? Well, he has a Machiavellian approach to life and is nasty quick with a shiv, but to find out, you will have to read the story.
levi66's review against another edition
4.0
This story is a prequel to the Low Town series. It shows Warden's modus operandi for problem solving and demonstrates why his peers consider him to be a formidable player.
The following pertains to the entire Low Town series. Don't worry--there's no spoilers!
Wow! I loved the mix of fantasy and hardboiled crime. The Warden is not a great man. He's been brought low by his own mistakes and addictions. He's a cynic and a misanthrope. He's self-demeaning and self-pitying. However, in each installment of this series, he acts from a deep-down altruistic impulse. We like the Warden because he's a better person than he thinks he is.
The series is written in the first person from Warden's point of view. The books are full of digressions in the form of flashbacks. I am not always a fan of flashbacks, but they are deftly done here and greatly enhance the narrative.
The prose has a biting cleverness to it that is a combination of Joe Abercrombie and Terry Pratchett. Every description and every nuance is filtered through Warden's cynical and self-pitying point of view. The Warden is a broken man, and he sees everything around him as broken and brought low. The reader is left to wonder if a more optimistic narrator would describe the same scenes in more pleasant or uplifting terms.
This is one of my most highy-rated series to date.
View the complete review here at Epic Grit.
The following pertains to the entire Low Town series. Don't worry--there's no spoilers!
Wow! I loved the mix of fantasy and hardboiled crime. The Warden is not a great man. He's been brought low by his own mistakes and addictions. He's a cynic and a misanthrope. He's self-demeaning and self-pitying. However, in each installment of this series, he acts from a deep-down altruistic impulse. We like the Warden because he's a better person than he thinks he is.
The series is written in the first person from Warden's point of view. The books are full of digressions in the form of flashbacks. I am not always a fan of flashbacks, but they are deftly done here and greatly enhance the narrative.
The prose has a biting cleverness to it that is a combination of Joe Abercrombie and Terry Pratchett. Every description and every nuance is filtered through Warden's cynical and self-pitying point of view. The Warden is a broken man, and he sees everything around him as broken and brought low. The reader is left to wonder if a more optimistic narrator would describe the same scenes in more pleasant or uplifting terms.
This is one of my most highy-rated series to date.
View the complete review here at Epic Grit.
aroguemonster's review against another edition
2.0
I wanted to like this book, but the villain was quite obvious, and the portrayals of the various fantasy races was unforgivably racist, and the amount of contempt a drug dealer has for prostitutes was off-putting. I'd say the women in the book were flat, but I think many of the characters were flat and cliched.
crazywig's review against another edition
DNF - likely due to narrator. Will try again with ebook.
tomunro's review against another edition
5.0
There is a power available to first person narratives, being wholly inside the protaganist's head and experiencing the story only through their eyes. The people and the context are filtered by the lens of the unreliable narrator's own distorting perspective. I have just finished this book and I am suddenly struck by the thought - do I even know the narrator's name? He is the Warden and I have ridden so intimately in his head that I know and use his own name as little as I would think of my own in everyday life. I am and so is he.
The story is sustained by an intoxicating mix of rich ingredients. The writing is lyrical, the view point like a fantasy version of Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's smooth private investigator. Our Hero, like Marlowe encounters murder and straddles the cultural map, between the squalor of the underclass and the unjustified privilege of an elite tottering unknowingly on the brink of extinction. But the Warden is more that Marlowe, he has a complex past and when we first him his business is trafficking a variety of imaginatively named narcotics, rebranded for a fantasy setting, after all vice is universal. When you think of the city of Rigis (of which low town is the seediest quarter), think not of Minas Tirith, so much as Dickensian London, or even the Gilroy's cartons of the gin houses of Georgian times. The warden is not above sampling his own wares, a sniff of pixie breath getting him through a variety of very trying days and there are plenty of them in the course of this book.
But this is so much more than Marlowe with magic. There is a city struggling with the aftermath of a plague and a war, which add elements of 1660s London and early twentieth century England to the delicious stew that Polanski is cooking. The Warden has a dark past forged in a gruellng warfare of trenches and incompetence. Maybe it is the bloodbath of Verdun, or the torment of Iwo Jima's meat grinder, either way the Warden's reminiscences evoke a vivid impression of the horrors of war, of sundered comradeship. The finale of the war also resonates with the end of the second world war, an unimaginable weapon unleashed that destroys the enemy and saves lives. But this is not a nuclear bomb it is a vile work of magic, and the Warden did not see the last of it when the war ended.
Within that fragile national psyche, the Warden wonders through a polyglot city filled with nationalities so well known to him that we, who ride on his shoulder, must absorb an understanding of the complex cultural dynamics through an osmotic experience rather than explicit description. I cannot say I fully understood the differences, but this is a story not a travel guide and it is extremely well told. Every character, small or large (and some of them are very large), is given the dignity of depth and vitality and difference. No cardboard cut outs here, no generic grunts. Yancey the slightly spaced out musician, his match making mother, or the sultry madam, or the sick old man in the tower and his apprentice the woman with whom the Warden shares an unfulfilled past, and especially the leader of the Kiren and his elaborate formula of greeting and discourse. I enjoyed most those passages where the Warden and he exchanged threat and counter threat beneath a veil of wordy courtesy.
The bleak well crafted atmosphere reminded me of the Blade Runner film, the steam rising in the streets and, be it buildings or weather, interiors or exteriors, Polanski paints with a colourful palette. The Dickensian element comes to the fore in the street urchins, Wren - the would be artful dodger - determined to make the Warden into his mentor, and the Warden determined not to do charity, not to be good, but finding he cannot help himself when murder stalks the streets of Lowtown.
The writing is rich not spare, the dialogue sharp, the characters always convincingly true to themselves. It is a book that enveloped and absorbed me and, too near the end, I realised I should have book marked more quotes to share - but then let other readers find them for themselves. I did note this one just as one exemplar of what I liked in the writing. A descriptor of a guest at a debauched party for the jaded rich, "Up close she looked like someone better seen from further away."
Reading this book is like watching a cook creating something beautiful and engaging from a variety of ingredients and yet still surprising at the end - so that although I had watched the whole process at close hand, I was left marvelling, where did that come from?
The story is sustained by an intoxicating mix of rich ingredients. The writing is lyrical, the view point like a fantasy version of Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's smooth private investigator. Our Hero, like Marlowe encounters murder and straddles the cultural map, between the squalor of the underclass and the unjustified privilege of an elite tottering unknowingly on the brink of extinction. But the Warden is more that Marlowe, he has a complex past and when we first him his business is trafficking a variety of imaginatively named narcotics, rebranded for a fantasy setting, after all vice is universal. When you think of the city of Rigis (of which low town is the seediest quarter), think not of Minas Tirith, so much as Dickensian London, or even the Gilroy's cartons of the gin houses of Georgian times. The warden is not above sampling his own wares, a sniff of pixie breath getting him through a variety of very trying days and there are plenty of them in the course of this book.
But this is so much more than Marlowe with magic. There is a city struggling with the aftermath of a plague and a war, which add elements of 1660s London and early twentieth century England to the delicious stew that Polanski is cooking. The Warden has a dark past forged in a gruellng warfare of trenches and incompetence. Maybe it is the bloodbath of Verdun, or the torment of Iwo Jima's meat grinder, either way the Warden's reminiscences evoke a vivid impression of the horrors of war, of sundered comradeship. The finale of the war also resonates with the end of the second world war, an unimaginable weapon unleashed that destroys the enemy and saves lives. But this is not a nuclear bomb it is a vile work of magic, and the Warden did not see the last of it when the war ended.
Within that fragile national psyche, the Warden wonders through a polyglot city filled with nationalities so well known to him that we, who ride on his shoulder, must absorb an understanding of the complex cultural dynamics through an osmotic experience rather than explicit description. I cannot say I fully understood the differences, but this is a story not a travel guide and it is extremely well told. Every character, small or large (and some of them are very large), is given the dignity of depth and vitality and difference. No cardboard cut outs here, no generic grunts. Yancey the slightly spaced out musician, his match making mother, or the sultry madam, or the sick old man in the tower and his apprentice the woman with whom the Warden shares an unfulfilled past, and especially the leader of the Kiren and his elaborate formula of greeting and discourse. I enjoyed most those passages where the Warden and he exchanged threat and counter threat beneath a veil of wordy courtesy.
The bleak well crafted atmosphere reminded me of the Blade Runner film, the steam rising in the streets and, be it buildings or weather, interiors or exteriors, Polanski paints with a colourful palette. The Dickensian element comes to the fore in the street urchins, Wren - the would be artful dodger - determined to make the Warden into his mentor, and the Warden determined not to do charity, not to be good, but finding he cannot help himself when murder stalks the streets of Lowtown.
The writing is rich not spare, the dialogue sharp, the characters always convincingly true to themselves. It is a book that enveloped and absorbed me and, too near the end, I realised I should have book marked more quotes to share - but then let other readers find them for themselves. I did note this one just as one exemplar of what I liked in the writing. A descriptor of a guest at a debauched party for the jaded rich, "Up close she looked like someone better seen from further away."
Reading this book is like watching a cook creating something beautiful and engaging from a variety of ingredients and yet still surprising at the end - so that although I had watched the whole process at close hand, I was left marvelling, where did that come from?
ranaelizabeth's review against another edition
5.0
Yes, yes, yes. I love detective stories (note: this is different than a cop story or a murder mystery) and I especially love them when they channel Sam Spade and fit squarely in the pulp-noir genre. And I especially, especially love them when they are done in a different/fantasy world.