Tom Lin: Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu (2022, Little Brown & Company)
English language
Published July 6, 2022 by Little Brown & Company.
This is a very, very good book.
I will follow Tom Lin's future work with great interest.
This is a great, bleak blend of nihilistic Western and magical realism. I’ll be the first to say that this is not a book for everyone. This is, at its core, a mythic epic. Full of plot and magic, death and poetry. But if you’re looking for deep characterization or even a clue as to what makes the title character tick, this isn’t the book for you. The characters here are archetypes more than they are people. Which is fine for this type of story in my eyes but may leave others frustrated. I loved it, though.
Westerns are another one of those genres like Noir where I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect until I actually started reading those books. What I want out of a Western is some good ol' rootin', tootin' and shootin' with a dash of sad introspection and commentary on the futility of raging against technological progress. Instead, I've been getting miserable protagonists that I find myself rooting against and stories with long stretches of absolutely nothing happening at all.
This book was a pleasant surprise in that it was exactly what I wanted it to be.
At its heart, this is a revenge tale that we join already in progress, some of the names on the eponymous Ming Tsu's hitlist already taken care of. The slight he experienced was pretty rough and I understand why a character in this situation would develop a singular focus to …
Westerns are another one of those genres like Noir where I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect until I actually started reading those books. What I want out of a Western is some good ol' rootin', tootin' and shootin' with a dash of sad introspection and commentary on the futility of raging against technological progress. Instead, I've been getting miserable protagonists that I find myself rooting against and stories with long stretches of absolutely nothing happening at all.
This book was a pleasant surprise in that it was exactly what I wanted it to be.
At its heart, this is a revenge tale that we join already in progress, some of the names on the eponymous Ming Tsu's hitlist already taken care of. The slight he experienced was pretty rough and I understand why a character in this situation would develop a singular focus to seek vengeance on those that wronged him. I didn't think it'd feel very cathartic to watch him get that comeuppance, but I was invested enough to see it through. And I'm glad I did, because that climax and final chapter alone bumped this up another star rating for me; that was a fantastic conclusion in my opinion.
There was a recurring motif and theme about memories not being perfect that was hammered on a lot in the first half of the book that was pretty much dropped in the second half, which I found strange. And there's a good portion of the book where the protagonist is traveling with a troupe of roadside performers for lack of a better description, but they didn't stick around as long as I expected and wanted them to. The last quarter or so, Ming Tsu is alone, but even these chapters devoid of dialogue kept me engaged with some frankly beautiful prose. It was very environmental, but also felt very different from all the parts that preceded it.
It's hard to make a revenge tale that's not too predictable, but it was rewarding to see one that didn't do what I expected.
