REVIEW: New York Minute by Stephen Aryan

Take a dash of post-apocalyptic fantasy, add a whole heap of noir crime PI thriller, bake it until it’s dark as fuck, and then you’ve got a perfect Stephen Aryan genre-blending novella. New York Minute by Stephen Aryan is a fast-paced crime story with fantasy set dressing, imagining a world where New York is unrecognizable, with magic beasts we only catch a glimpse of, sword fights in alleys that we can’t get enough of, and a whole ocean of blood spilled in the pursuit of the truth.

“In the inner city, across all of Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and part of Queens, the roads are paved with stone. There’s no Staten Island here. That’s the Old Country. Everything old is new again, or at least, the parts of history we can stomach. The rest, our ancestors tried to leave behind and good riddance. They made a mess of the Old Country. That’s one of the reasons we’re here in this new place, trying to do things right this time.”

The story that unfolds in New York Minute seems to try to ask who we are as a culture, even when all the trappings of our modern world have been destroyed by some unknown event. What Stephen Aryan manages to accomplish in such a small page count is stunning. Perhaps because he gave us just a hint of a familiar setting and plot (a PI mystery in New York City) we feel grounded immediately, even though his New York has completely changed. Cole Blackstone is everything we want in a noir detective; he’s hard, he’s seen Some Shit, he’s tired, and he doesn’t flinch from violence when it inevitably finds him. His sidekick is tragically doomed and absolutely perfect. And the crime world he has to infiltrate to find a mob boss’s missing daughter is exactly as bleak as we’re hoping it will be.

New York Minute uses its small word count to hurdle us through action that’s as gritty and bloody as any Grimdark fan could want, but also to spend a moment considering the human condition. If everything old is new again, can we reset and strive for a better version of humanity? The world that Cole is forced to navigate suggests not. Crime and violence are as familiar to us as blood.

My only ‘complaint’ is that New York Minute was short—I could have devoured a few hundred more pages!

Stephen Aryan has promised this will be a series of novellas after New York Minute, and I for one am first in line for the next Blackstone story. New York Minute should be on every grimdark fan’s TBR pile.

Read New York Minute by Stephen Aryan

Read on Amazon

The post REVIEW: New York Minute by Stephen Aryan appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.