heist – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

You may have noticed this about me by now: I love me a good heist story. Any time a book is about a charming rogue whose job is to rob somebody, I’m pretty well in from the jump with no further information needed. Breaking into somewhere? Breaking out of somewhere? Scamming the local merchantry or rich assholes into, well, anything? Yep, here’s my debit card, we’re good.

The Silverblood Promise is not quite a heist novel, at least in the sense that it’s not about a single overarching act of scammery. Main character Lukan Cardova is a bit of a con man and certainly a charming rogue, but the story kicks off when his estranged father dies and sends him off on a wild quest to a hive of scum and villainy on the other side of the continent, in search of … well, Lukan’s really not sure at all what he’s in search of. He has a last-words type of note written in his father’s blood with three names on it: his, the name of the city, and another he doesn’t recognize. This is very much a “one thing leads to another” type of book, where he finds out who he’s looking for, but she’s in jail, and then he deals with that, and then there’s this whole other thing that he needs to do, and everything he manages to complete leads to another quest, much to his great annoyance. The story keeps moving along at a pleasantly rapid clip, and by the end of it Lukan is not only hip-deep in local and possibly inter-dimensional politics as well as a thieves’ guild or two but he’s acquired a combination minion and surrogate daughter in an eleven-year-old named Flea, who tries to rob him early on and then just … sticks around after that. There’s no One Big Scheme, but there are literally five or six smaller ones; maybe this is a heists novel, and not a heist novel, who knows.

There are enough ideas for five or six books packed into this book, which is Part One of (I believe) a trilogy, with the second volume to follow this fall. If anything, the book might be overstuffed, as every side character and local power structure Lukan runs into is something I wanted to know more about, but as far s I know the second novel takes place in an entirely different city. The book’s biggest weak spot is, unfortunately, Lukan himself, who can tend toward being whiny (he’s thoroughly exasperated with the plot of his book by the end) and is also a bit of a drunk, but the book at least knows that being the drunk is a character flaw. This is Logan’s debut novel and there’s also a bit of that thing where Lukan occasionally basically replies to the third-person omniscient narrator. The type of thing where the book drops a bit of worldbuilding and then Lukan will think Yeah, that sucked, or something along those lines. It can certainly be overlooked and some people won’t even notice it, but if it’s the kind of thing you notice, it’s gonna knock you out of the book once in a while.

That said, my gripes are minor and I chewed through this book’s 500+ pages in two days, losing some sleep along the way. I had a feeling, picking it up, that this was going to be one of those books that I regretted leaving on my Unread shelf for so long, and … yeah. I’ll be reading the sequel pretty close to immediately, when it comes out in November.

ABIGAIL is one of those movies that technically has a big twist, but if you’re aware of the movie at all, all of the marketing, including the trailers, has spoiled the shit out of that big twist already, and it happens early enough in the film that the twist is kind of also the premise, which makes it hard to talk about. So this sentence will serve as the spoiler-free review: Abigail is kind of a failure as a horror movie– I am bad at horror movies, and I have been since I became a father, and I was never scared. It is, however, a pretty damn effective, predictable but wildly entertaining horror-adjacent action/slasher film, and all in all I’m going to recommend it, so long as you go in with the proper expectations. Expect something closer to From Dusk Till Dawn than to The Exorcist or Paranormal Activity and you’ll be fine.

So, yeah. Spoilers from here out, although once you know the premise, you already know the broad strokes of the movie.

Alisha Weir, am I right? I haven’t seen a child actor this effective since Season 1 of Stranger Things Millie Bobby Brown, and I really don’t think Millie has ever had a role that allowed her to cut loose the way Weir gets to in this movie. Millie has never gotten a line as iconic as “I’m sorry for what’s going to happen to you.” But let’s back up and talk about the actual movie: Abigail starts off as a heist movie, as a group of criminals kidnap a little girl from a massive mansion and then, rather inexplicably, spirit her off to a similarly massive but much older and creepier mansion out in the middle of nowhere, where Giancarlo Esposito tells them to wait with the girl for 24 hours, during which time he’ll extract a $50 million ransom from her father, which they can all split and then be off on their separate ways.

Only, oops, the little girl is a vampire, and, well, it doesn’t go great for them. This plan has some flaws even before you get to the vampire, and my wife called another minor twist early on– all of the kidnappers have screwed over this little girl’s vampire crime lord father at some point or another, and she’s managed to bring them all here so she can hunt and kill them. Two of them die before it’s immediately clear what’s going on, and the reactions of the rest to being hunted by an actual vampire are kind of hilarious. Eventually the main female character survives, blah blah blah, you know how this is going to go.

This movie rides on the strength of its atmosphere and its characters, and the house is effectively creepy, Amelia’s penchant for tossing ballet moves into her fighting style and her hunting (watching her tiptoe across a stairway bannister on her way to try and kill somebody is impressively fucked up; her movement and physicality throughout the movie is excellently done) and the gore level is turned up to 15; the number of bodies and/or body parts that literally explode in this movie is … significant.

And, again, the characters are fun, if broadly drawn; the ex-undercover cop turned criminal, the dim-bulb Quebecois muscle guy, the e-girl hacker, and the Main Character With a Dark Past, along with an ex-marine and a druggie wheelman, plus Giancarlo fucking Esposito, who has never in his life not elevated anything he was in. The biggest problem with the movie is that everyone in it looks like someone more famous than them; the Quebecker looks like Elon Musk, the hacker looks like Winona Ryder circa Beetlejuice, the ex-cop is Not Ryan Gosling, and the druggie is basically playing the exact same character he played in Euphoria, which I guess isn’t quite the same thing but it’s still kinda weird. They all bounce off of each other nicely and most of them get at least a couple of cool moments here and there to chew some scenery of their own. I mean, this moment here. I love it:

The house itself is straight out of Resident Evil, and I mean it as a compliment when I say this movie would make a great video game, although it kind of already did, except with a little ballerina girl instead of nine-and-a-half-foot-tall Lady Dimitrescu. The scenery is great, the pool scene is horrifying, the ‘plosions are gross, the characters are fun, and at least some of the acting is absolutely phenomenal. Again, it’s not scary, so don’t go in wanting that, but I’m really glad we actually sat down and watched this last night. I don’t watch many movies any more so I like to be able to recommend them when I do. Two thumbs up.