Week four of Flex has seen us adventure into the foreboding industrial nightmare of chapters fifteen to twenty and come out blinking, sheened by a light dew of cold anxious sweat (or that could just be me). My subtitle for this week’s summary would be Shit Just Got Real, which is a phrase I kind of hate but which feels solidly applicable here.
On one level of ‘getting real’, Flex is growing to be genuinely scary. Also, really really violent. I’m talking the seriously messed up kind of violent, the one you get a sick pleasure from in the throes of reading but then later you find yourself dwelling on it, turning the image over in your mind and pulling that face you pull when you’re imagining terrible things (again, it could just be me). A helicopter crashes through a ceiling, plummeting like ‘a severed head’; someone gets sawn right down the middle by alternate reality cooties; characters you never knew you didn’t want dead wind up horribly, tragically murdered.
To counterbalance and, perhaps counterintuitively, enhance this delectable awfulness, the book has also been at its funniest. The physical comedy of the description and metaphor is golden. The characters are believably, infuriatingly, affectionately ridiculous (in one of my favourite throw-away moments of exposition, Valentine tries to sneak around unnoticed under a cardboard box like Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid). In particular, watching somebody’s indignant refusal to engage with the nonsensical and fantastical in the face of utter terrifying chaos, while creating utter terrifying chaos, is just pretty hilarious. The mental image of Paul Tsabo, miracle-drug dealer and paranormal pencil pusher at large, marching up to the customer service desk of life and calmly demanding a refund is one of the funniest and most heartfelt metaphors for real personal power I’ve read in ages.
There’s a deeper humour starting to come out, too, and that’s where the second brand of ‘real’ comes in; there are witty truth-bombs everywhere in these chapters. The author’s favourite line in the novel, for example: ‘One skill can redeem a life splintered by flaws. But only if you’re very, very good at it.’ My favourite? ‘Magic was no replacement for common sense.’
We’ve come a long way together, from something fast and light to something… well, fast and light, but also hard, and dark, and dangerous. I can’t wait to see how much more of these facets Flex can summon – or, to see it turn a corner and offer up something completely new again. Keep following us on #DirgeRAWK; I just know Steinmetz has got so many more tricks up his sleeve to come.
