HebrewPunk
HebrewPunk
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So a tzaddik, a rabbi, and a vampire walk into a bank ...
A collection of four stories, one featuring each of those characters at a turning point in their lives and a heist story that ties it all together. Each of those stories features concepts that could fall into the ridiculous - for example, a drug-addled immortal warring with an angel, a blood bank that keeps holy water in its sprinkler system as an anti-theft system, and lychanthropic nazis seeking Vlad Dracul to recruit him to their cause.
Tidhar's writing style is like a good whiskey - dark, and with a hard edge to it, but in a way that manages to be self-effacing at the same time. He's good, and he knows that he's good enough that he doesn't need to try to impress you.
On a technical level, Uganda is the most interesting story in the collection - in in Tidhar manages to tell an epistolary story that intertwines an interview transcript and three different yet fully-realized journals of different characters. It would be difficult enough to keep those stories straight and well-developed in a novel, but to do it in the limited space of a short story was very impressive.