Outside of the #DirgeRAWK (Read Along With Katy) Twitter conversation, Ferrett Steinmetz’s Flex is a novel that I have, so far, struggled to synopsise attractively when recommending it to friends.
“Dude, it is so good so far! A magical ex-cop tries to save his daughter’s face with an octopus made from paperwork!”
“So the main character Paul gets his foot trampled by a horse from a painting, right, and it’s totally awesome. Also, he taught me how to sex chickens.”
“It’s kinda like magical Breaking Bad, probably, except I haven’t seen Breaking Bad so I might be accidentally lying.”
Let’s start with the basics. At the heart of Flex, predictably, is flex – the magic to bend physics to get what you want. For some people, this is an innate ability born of a particular obsession; for others not so blessed, it can be bought in crystallised form from dealers and snorted for an intense day of things going your way. Mess around with flex, however, and you incur flux, the Universe’s way of trying balance out all of the good luck by causing catastrophic accidents. And then there’s Paul Tsabo, insurance agent and ex-cop, working out the fine-line between flex and flux as he feeds signatures to the Lovecraftian paper-monster in his office and tries to care for his daughter, and himself, after a staggering divorce. He’s on the road to settling into this new life, until someone else’s flux makes his day incredibly unlucky.
The plot so far is fast-paced and liable to twist like a snake, away from expectations and into the thrilling unknown. Even the prologue, which I usually assume from the off is going to be boring, is nigh-on flammable with a wickedly playful shock and suspense, and the story hasn’t really calmed down since. The narrative indulges in a few tropes – the injured daughter, the guilty father trying to make things right, the disabled ex-cop out for revenge – while cracking others apart.
One of my favourite things about these opening chapters is the feeling of being plunged directly into the middle of Paul Tsabo’s life, right at the heart of the world and the action he’s occupying. Information is dispensed when it is useful to the story, not necessarily as it’s useful to the reader – you are expected to keep up. The best part of this is, Steinmetz writes in such a way that you are sure you can manage it, even if it’s at a jog, and there’s something about the narrative that reassures – all in good time.
From the perspective of my own paperback copy of Flex, I’m now 69 pages in – the story and the read-along are just beginning, and yet so much has happened. It’s tempting to say something like ‘It looks like things are about to get really interesting’ as we move on to chapter six, but I have thought something like that for pretty much every chapter so far. Every new little chapter is a cherrybomb of compactly excitable energy, and I’m a bit of a nervous wreck waiting to find out what’s coming up.
You can join me in my Flex thoughts using the hashtag #DirgeRAWK on twitter. For everyone already reading along with me, thanks so much; I’ll see you at chapter six!
