Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig

The first thing that stuns you about Chuck Wendig’s Blackbirds is its cover. Designed by award-winning South African graphic artist Joey Hifi, it is complicated, gritty and violent - it is also gorgeous and absolutely perfect for the book. Blackbirds continues to set you on edge once you get beyond the startling image on the cover - it is just as much of a gritty, violent and unsettling ride right to the bitter, bloody end. And it is fun all the way through. 

Blackbirds is near pitch-perfect Urban Fantasy fare. It’s a narrative that won’t settle, just as its protagonist won’t. Set in motel rooms and along highways, there are truckers and drifters, trailer parks and diners, vending machines and ‘Prime, Grade-A Road Trash’ in an America where ‘Nowhere is nowhere. Everywhere is somewhere.’ The protagonist is Miriam, who is the anti-hero sort of hero. She’s prickly, she swears a lot, she’s selfish, violent and completely welcome in a world of sappy female leads and male protagonist dominated Urban fiction. In her own words, Miriam is ‘a curse … an infected boil on your neck’. But unlike any other drifter hitching rides along the highway, Miriam has the ability to see how every person she touches will die - the exact time, place and cause. It’s more complicated and jarring than the ‘I see dead people’ premise, but over the years Miriam has learnt to make the most of it. She survives by quite literally waiting for the deaths of strangers - she can’t change the future but she can benefit from its inevitability. The book opens with Miriam watching a man die in a motel room, then stealing what cash he has and moving on. She’s sickened by the death: ‘It often hits her like this. Like some part of her is dying along with them, some part that she has to gag on and purge and flush away.’ This single scene sets up Miriam’s character perfectly - she’s strong, resourceful and has accepted her lot in life - but is not immune to the trauma caused by the deaths she witnesses. She’s the perfect antagonistic protagonist - angry, mean, covered in emotional cicatrix and immensely likable. 

Miriam’s personal narrative moves along at a steady speed, well paced with clever dialogue and tightly wound scenes of roadside violence, until she meets a trucker whose future death appears to involve her directly. Louis’s death is the single fixed point in the non-linear narrative that Wendig moves towards - that’s not an easy technique to pull off, considering the reader already knows what the major climax of the narrative will be, but Wendig does it with aplomb. Even knowing where Miriam will end up is not enough to decrease the adrenalin caused by the way she gets there - Blackbirds is ripe with bar brawls, sexcapades in stranger’s homes, a con artist who seems to be the only one able to manipulate Miriam and two very strange, frightening assassins on her trail. 

Although it is tethered by a young protagonist, Blackbirds is more than conventional Young Adult fiction. It is, in every way, just as easily hardboiled, noir fiction as it is Urban Fantasy, and adult in all the same ways. Miriam has a constant foul mouth, she’s morally ambiguous, opportunistic and never shies away from a fight. Not your average first choice for a role model for young women, and yet she’s a clever, complicated protagonist who leads her life as she chooses, with complete agency and control - just not over the deaths she can see. It is a strange, twisty mess that Miriam’s in: ‘truth be told,’ she says, ‘I’m never really that comfortable’, and with Blackbirds, neither is the reader. 

Discomfort is a good thing in this case. Blackbirds takes a strong, sharp hold and slaps its reader in the face repeatedly with profanity, with blood and gore and deliberate shocks to the system. It is, in fact, quite refreshing that Wendig never holds back, regardless of who his audience may turn out to be - this is clearly a story that had to be told, in a voice that couldn’t be held back. Blackbirds is the best reflection of American urban grime that contemporary fiction has to offer; a sordid little story full of grotesqueries and possibilities. There’s almost too much action in it for one book, so it is no wonder that a sequel - Mockingbird - has followed.  

Wendig’s own blog is testament to his own personal fierce voice - terribleminds.com has provided hundreds of readers (and writers in progress) with advice on how to write and perhaps more importantly, how not to write. His article 25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing went viral, but should be read by every person attempting to write fiction. His final point in it is ‘Stop Being Afraid’ in which he writes, ‘everybody who wanted to be a writer and didn’t become one failed based on one of two critical reasons: one, they were lazy, or two, they were afraid.’ With Blackbirds, it is entirely clear that Wendig was neither of the two.