High Stakes - George R. R. Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass

High Stakes is the 23rd book in the shared world series Wild Cards, and the final book in what has become known as the Mean Streets Triad. The triad started with Fort Freak (2011), which combines a police procedural with comic book heroes inspired characters. This final volume is quite a different beast though. It takes us far from the streets of Joker Town in New York and pits an unlikely bunch of heroes against a malevolent foe capable of destroying the world. It is pure Wild Cards alright, but probably not the ending of this story arc people were expecting.

Detective Franny Black manages to crack the case of the disappearing Jokers. He tracks them down to a casino in the city of Talas, Kazakhstan, where Jokers are forced to fight to the death in an arena. Franny's intrusion puts a stop to that but it soon turns out the casino hides a much greater threat. The jokers do not just serve as a sick kind of entertainment. The deaths of the Jokers slakes the thirst for blood and suffering of a creature waiting to unleash its terrible power upon the world. Franny may have solved a crime and destroyed the world in one move.

The Wild Cards series swing back and forth between short story collection and traditional novel. High Stakes is what Martin calls a full mosaic. It was written by six authors: Melinda M. Snodgrass, John Jos. Miller, David Anthony Durham, Caroline Spector, Stephen Leigh, and Ian Tregillis, all of whom have contributed to the series before. Where, in the previous two novels in the triad, the authors all had clearly defined sections, this book is edited in a different way. You can still recognize the various contributions by the point of view, but they are worked into seven long sections with contributions by all the authors instead of individual chapters. The editing is decent, some minor continuity errors but nothing that really bothered me. There must have been quite a bit of rewriting involved. The copy-editor could have done another pass though. If I spot typos there's a lot of them.

I suspect that quite a lot of people will not particularly like this novel. It breaks from the police procedural and launches into full-blown Lovecraftian horror. The horrific element of the novel is, as one would expect from a comic book inspired series, very much over the top. The authors don't shy away from describing events in gory detail. I felt the copious descriptions of the nightmarish scenes in Talas padded the novel quite a bit. I suppose with six authors you need to give them some space to do their thing but this book definitely could have been shorter. If this gory kind of monster horror is your thing, then you will want to read this book. It is such a break with the two books that have gone before, and the reader has to have read Lowball (2014) to make sense of this one, that for many readers it will be a disappointment.

Here and there, a fine bit of characterization can be found in the novel. When the horror does not rely on monsters, it is actually truly horrific. The influence of the creature the Aces are fighting makes the darkest thoughts, hidden in the deepest recesses of their mind, surface. The shift between the face they normally show the world and the murderous monsters they can turn into is often rapid and very disturbing. Especially Molly, who swings between the lonely and selfish kleptomaniac she has shown herself to be and the murderous fury she can turn into several times in the book, is a good example of this. A lifetime of therapy probably won't be enough to deal with that kind of trauma.

While the novel is well padded and over the top, the authors do manage to keep it compulsively readable. The reader will want to know how they manage to defeat the monster lurking under Talas. To do that, the authors reach back to a character that has not appeared in the Triad before. For readers who have not read the other novels in the series, it may feel like a deus ex machina ending. I guess one of the advantages of having so much material to draw on, is always being able to drag in an Ace with useful powers.

High Stakes left me with pretty much the same feeling as Suicide Kings (2009), the final novel in the Committee Triad. The triad starts out interesting but then doesn't live up to the promise. This book was very readable, fun even at some level, but it was not a good book. High Stakes manages to make the triad feel unbalanced by so completely changing the nature of the story. It makes the book feel like a story attached to the previous two books at a later time rather than a continuous narrative. I guess there is a trade off between leaving the authors space to be creative and agreeing in advance on a story arc. Martin has sold three more Wild Cards books to Tor. I hope they manage handle to this obvious limitation of their modus operandi better in those novels.

Book Details
Title: High Stakes
Editor: George R.R. Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass
Publisher: Tor
Pages: 555
Year: 2016
Language: English
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3562-3
First published: 2016