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Overview
What does it mean to be bad?
Eric Bear has it all: a successful career, a beautiful wife, a blissful home. He knows he's been lucky; a while back, his life revolved around drugs, gambling, a gang of stuffed-animal thugs, and notorious crime boss Nicholas Dove.
But the past isn't as far away as Eric had hoped. Rumors are swirling that Dove is on the Death List and that he wants Eric to save him. If Eric fails to act, his beloved wife, Emma Rabbit, will be torn apart, limb from limb, and reduced to stuffing.
With a nod to the best of noir and the wisest of allegories—interlaced with greed and gangsters—Amberville depicts an alternate world that mirrors our own realities and moral concerns, and reminds us of the inextricable link between good and evil.
Synopsis
What does it mean to be bad?
Eric Bear has it all: a successful career, a beautiful wife, a blissful home. He knows he's been lucky; a while back, his life revolved around drugs, gambling, a gang of stuffed-animal thugs, and notorious crime boss Nicholas Dove.
But the past isn't as far away as Eric had hoped. Rumors are swirling that Dove is on the Death List and that he wants Eric to save him. If Eric fails to act, his beloved wife, Emma Rabbit, will be torn apart, limb from limb, and reduced to stuffing.
With a nod to the best of noir and the wisest of allegories—interlaced with greed and gangsters—Amberville depicts an alternate world that mirrors our own realities and moral concerns, and reminds us of the inextricable link between good and evil.
The Washington Post - Claudia Deane
There's more than stuffing here, though, including questions of good vs. evil, life vs. death, and sanity vs. insanity. Skip that evening Scotch and read this one stone-cold sober—it's plenty trippy as is.
Editorials
Brad Meltzer
"When you’re tired of run-of-the-mill fiction, it’s time to read AMBERVILLE. These are stuffed animals like you’ve never seen: deep, dark, and, somehow, utterly believable. Lucky us—a mystery that’s completely original."San Francisco Chronicle
"A delightful mystery-thriller set in a city populated by stuffed animals. [It] is dastardly fun to read.…Once the "whoa - this is weird" reaction subsides, ‘Amberville’ is a nifty rollick that’s as bracing as a good shot of whisky."Los Angeles Times
"[An] audacious concept . . . [a] giddy thrill."BookForum
"[A] delightful debut…. No character in Amberville is quite what he or she seems, and each offers a meditation on truth, power, the value of goodness, and the nature of evil."Chicago Sun-Times
"Amberville has some bite to it. . . . True identities constantly shift in this world—lovers might be enemies, priests can be evil, and stuffed animals, given the depth and intellect that Davys gives them, may as well be human."Claudia Deane
There's more than stuffing here, though, including questions of good vs. evil, life vs. death, and sanity vs. insanity. Skip that evening Scotch and read this one stone-cold sober—it's plenty trippy as is.—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
Those with an appetite for the bizarre will best appreciate the pseudonymous Davys's offbeat debut, set entirely in a town inhabited by living, breathing stuffed animals. Everyone in Mollisan Town fears the Death List, the legendary roster of residents designated for pickup by the Chauffeurs, from whose red pickup truck no one returns. When word that mob boss Nicholas Dove (yes, a stuffed bird) has been placed on the list, he coerces Eric Bear into helping him escape his fate. Bear, who's put his shady past behind him and turned to a career in advertising, goes in search of answers. The backbiting and betrayal would certainly be at home in a conventional hard-boiled crime novel, but some readers may feel the premise's novelty wears thin after a while. Passages of clunky translation don't help ("From being a suspect rat who through her mere presence transformed the individuals around the conference table to normalcy, here she was in her right element"). (Feb. 24)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Library Journal
Davys's first novel is set in a town made up entirely of stuffed animals that walk and talk like humans. This clever idea soon loses its luster, as Davys does little with the potential except in a few instances to play it entirely for laughs, as when a teddy bear is beaten until he coughs up cotton. The plot revolves around Eric Bear's quest to save his wife's life by removing the gangster boss from the infamous "death list." Thus begins Eric's descent into the underworlds of Mollisan Town, a shadowy neighborhood on a trash dump where the deformed animals live, and finally to the puppet master himself, in the least likely place of all. The prose and dialog lack the style and wit of true hard-boiled writers, and at times the narrative falls into long, flat exposition. The second half of the novel is more engaging as the characters' duplicity increases. But the ending is implausible, tacked on in an epilog to make sense of the earlier gaps in logic. Not recommended.
—Stephen Morrow