Hoodtown

Christa Faust’s Hoodtown is an awesome mixture of two of my favorite geek habitats: Mexican wrestlers and noir. Hard-boiled prose, with masks. She postulates a world where there are people who from practically birth put on wrestler masks, sort of a subset of humanity, a race or ethnic group if you want to call it that, and they are downtrodden, they live in their own urban ghetto with their own services and they rarely mix with the rest of humanity. 


The book is political and has its own well thought out social commentary about have and have-not, a perfect noir situation I might add, but it is downright fun. Faust is more of a pulp writer than straigh-out noir and her female protagonist plays out like a cross between El Santo and Red Sonja, but she juggles the varying influences deftly. It reads quick and clean, and is not bogged down by the kitchen-sink approach to world-building


an excellenbt read. Enjoy