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Overview
After a flu pandemic, a large-scale terrorist attack, and the total collapse of Wall Street, New York City is reduced to a shadow of its former self. As the city struggles to dig itself out of the wreckage, a nameless, obsessive-compulsive veteran with a spotty memory, a love for literature, and a strong if complex moral code (that doesn’t preclude acts of extreme violence) has taken up residence at the main branch of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street.
Dubbed "Dewey Decimal" for his desire to reorganize the library's stock, our protagonist (who will reappear in the next novel in this series) gets by as bagman and muscle for New York City's unscrupulous district attorney. Decimal takes no pleasure in this kind of civic dirty work. He'd be perfectly content alone amongst his books. But this is not in the cards, as the DA calls on Dewey for a seemingly straightforward union-busting job.
What unfolds throws Dewey into a bloody tangle of violence, shifting allegiances, and old vendettas, forcing him to face the darkness of his own past and the question of his buried identity.
With its high body count and snarky dialogue, The Dewey Decimal System pays respects to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Jim Thompson. Healthy amounts of black humor and speculative tendencies will appeal to fans of Charlie Huston, Nick Tosches, Duane Swierczynski, Victor Gischler, Robert Ferrigno, and early Jonathan Lethem.
Nathan Larson is best known as an award-winning film music composer, having created the scores for over thirty movies such as Boys Don’t Cry, Dirty Pretty Things, and The Messenger. In the 1990s he was the lead guitarist for the influential prog-punk outfit Shudder to Think. This is his first novel. Larson lives in Harlem, New York City, with his wife and son.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Terrorist outrages committed on Valentine's Day and a superflu epidemic have devastated New York City, whose population is now about 800,000, in film music composer Larson's less than stellar debut, the first in a series. The quirky narrator, a hygiene freak who can't remember his given name, runs errands for Manhattan DA Daniel Rosenblatt, a crime lord rather than a law enforcement officer. Rosen-blatt has nicknamed the narrator Dewey Decimal, because Decimal is obsessed with reorganizing the books in the main branch of the New York Public Library, which no longer has a working computer catalogue. The loathsome Rosenblatt dispatches Decimal on various unsavory errands, including "quieting" Yakiv Shapsko, a Ukrainian community leader. But when Decimal arrives at Shapsko's home in Queens, he encounters instead the man's attractive Latvian wife, Iveta, with whom he begins a complex and twist-filled relationship. Unfortunately, that relationship fails to engage, and violence too often substitutes for plot coherence in this dystopian view of a future Big Apple. (May)From the Publisher
"A nameless investiagator dogs New York streets made even meaner by a series of near-future calamities. [Larson’s] distopia is bound to win fans..."
--Kirkus Reviews
"The Dewey Decimal System is a winningly tight, concise and high-impact book, a violent, exhilarating odyssey that pitches its protagonist through a gratuitously detailed future New York."
--New York Press
"The Dewey Decimal System is proof positive that the private detective will remain a serious and seriously enjoyable literary archetype."
--Pop Matters
Kirkus Reviews
A nameless investigator dogs New York streets made even meaner by a series of near-future calamities.
Sometimes he calls himself Donny Smith after the name on his phony ID. Sometimes he calls himself Dewey Decimal after his passion for rearranging the disordered books in the Fifth Avenue branch of the New York Public Library. But he never calls himself by his real name, because he lost it in the endless disasters—a series of explosions, three economic collapses, the invasion of the Superflu—spun out of "the 2/14 Occurrence(s)" that decimated New York's population. Now Daniel Rosenblatt, the unelected D.A. who seized power amid the post-apocalyptic rubble, needs the obsessive system-builder for another routine errand: to make sure community leader Yakiv Shapsko, a Ukrainian émigré, doesn't do any more union organizing. Dewey, bent on murder, finds Shapsko, loses him, then goes to his home and finds his wife Iveta, who's well able to take care of herself. After Shapsko tries to hire Dewey to kill Iveta, and he returns to his own office only to find three intruders there, Dewey realizes he's stepped into something bigger and darker than he'd imagined—something presumably connected to Iveta's ex-lover, shadowy Serbian warlord Branko Jokanovic. The complications that follow mostly involve well-armed thugs and conspirators going to early graves, most of them sent there by Dewey.
When it comes to plotting, film composer Larson is content to follow Raymond Chandler's dictum, "When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun." But his dystopia is bound to win fans with strong stomachs.