Apparently, Andi Watson and Josh Howard's Clubbing came out a couple of months ago.  But I completely missed it, and it was sitting on the "new release" racks this week.  Maybe they've done a second printing.

It's another digest story from DC's Minx imprint.  Minx's remit is to capture the teenage girl audience using, for the most part, indie creators (and Mike Carey) doing the sort of stories that were doing very well for Oni a few years ago.  There's a certain logic to the plan, admittedly, and you've got to give them credit for trying something different instead of just cloning manga.

It would be nice to see Minx succeed.  It would show that the American publishers can adapt to the new market.  And it would vindicate all those people who claimed that indie books were the "real mainstream", which would be terribly popular if only the public knew about them.  Not a view I subscribe to, personally, but it would be quite nice if it was true.

Clubbing, however, is not the best way of testing the theory, because... well, it's not very good.  And that's surprising.  It's by Andi Watson.  He's a great talent, one of the best writers around when it comes to quiet, subtle, character pieces.  I can imagine his work being possibly a little too deliberate for the teen girl market.  But I'd always expect it to be good.  Unfortunately, Clubbing turns out to be a weird misfire of a book.

By the way, I'm going to spoil the ending - for reasons which will be apparent when I get to it - so if you're planning to read this story, you might want to look away now.

Lottie, a rich teenage goth, gets arrested after trying to get into a club with a fake ID.  Which is weird in itself, frankly.  Yes, technically it's a crime - presenting a forged document as real - but I've never heard of anyone being arrested for it.  It seems these London bouncers are law-abiding in the extreme.

Anyway, as punishment for her brush with the law, Lottie is banished to her grandparents' country club for the summer holidays.  Here, she meets the locals in a typical series of "culture clash" scenes.  She fails to get on with the local goths.  She meets a guy who's vaguely a love-interest, and their relationship goes from outright hostile to slightly thawed.  And she investigates a murder, although this really consists of her running around making haywire allegations until she blunders into the answer.

It's a strange story.  The first half seems to be a fairly standard "fish out of water" story.  Lottie wanders around being smug, rich and superficial.  Locals either indulge her or reluctantly tolerate her, and they're clearly in the right.  It's the opening of a stock plot - the one where Lottie learns an important lesson from her new environment, stops being so superficial, redeems herself, and gets the guy because her true qualities now shine through.  You've seen it a thousand times.

Well, the story doesn't do that.

Instead, it goes chasing off after the murder, which would normally be just a plot engine for the "fish out of water" material.  Somehow, instead, it ends up elbowing all of that stuff aside and building to a staggeringly ill-judged climax, in which Lottie encounters a group of local Satanists, and then fights a demon with a golf club.

That, pretty much, is the point where my jaw hit the floor.  Because there's no foreshadowing for an outright demon.  There's just about enough to get away with a group of respectable locals turning out to be cultists, although obviously it suffers badly from being desperately similar to the plot of Hot Fuzz.  But an actual, outright demon?  You can't suddenly wheel one of those out for the climax, after a hundred and thirty pages of characters wandering sedately around a golf course!  You just can't do that!  I couldn't believe it when I first read it.  Literally, I couldn't believe it.  I assumed it had to be a dream scene.

I mean, I'm all for genre-blending.  But that's not what Clubbing does.  It's the first half of a "fish out of water" storyline, and the final act of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and they've been joined together with sticky tape and staples. 

And Lottie never completes the character arc that the book seems to start off.  She gets to save the day, but she never stops being superficial and she never really seems to learn anything from her surroundings.  Frankly, I don't like her very much.

Artist Josh Howard was responsible for Dead@17, a horror book that got some decent reviews a couple of years ago.  His character designs are reasonably strong, although a brief flashback to the London club circuit suggests that all his teenage goths look rather similar.  But it's all a bit flat, and doesn't have the energy that it would need to carry off the finale.  He'd have been fine if the story had kept with the relatively sedate pace of its first half, mind you.

It's a wildly unsuccessful book - and a frustrating one, because it was going quite well up until the halfway mark.  But beyond that, I'm afraid, it all falls apart.

Rating: C

back | continue