Brooklyn Noir 2

January 1, 2005
Follow-up to the best-selling anthology, herein lies Brooklyn's criminal history as written by classic authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, etc. BookExpo America 2005 events with editors and select contributors.

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2005
" Brooklyn Noir" (2004)featured originals, but here, McLoughlin mines reprints, allowing him to pay tribute to "all the great stories that had given me the idea for such a book in the first place." These 13 Brooklyn-centric stories are slotted into the volume 1 categories ("Old School," "New School," "Cops and Robbers," and "Backwater Brooklyn") but with authors as wildly diverse as H. P. Lovecraft, Hubert Selby Jr., Donald E. Westlake, and Jonathan Lethem. (Pete Hamill and Maggie Estep make return appearances.) It's certainly possible to argue whether Lethem and Estep belong in a volume of "classics," or even whether the book is appropriately named (continuing the devaluation of the word " noir," here it's a generic "dark fiction"). But, though stylistically scattershot, this is good stuff, from Lovecraft's baroque "The Horror at Red Hook" to Selby's "Tralala" (one of the stories in " Last Exit to Brooklyn") to "By the Dawn's Early Light," a great Matt Scudder story by Lawrence Block. Terrific appeal for Brooklynites, but may seem an odd mix to the rest of the country.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)