Review: The Red Mohawk
My rating: [rating=4]
Blurb:
Everything seems peaceful in the small town of B Movie Hell until a mysterious serial killer in a skull mask topped with a red mohawk shows up and starts butchering the locals. Government agents Jack Munson and Milena Fonseca are sent to track down and eliminate the masked psychopath. But as they soon discover, the residents of B Movie Hell don’t want their help. This is a town like no other, and the locals have many dark secrets….
Already a hit in France and Germany with film rights optioned by Tobey Maguire’s Material Pictures, The Red Mohawk is a fun, outrageous and bloody thriller full of cinematic references and homages to many cult movies.
Review:
[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]
An entertaining novel, one that follows closely in the footsteps of a (bad) slasher movie, indeed—so I would advise to read it as a parody, and not take it too seriously, even though it deals with a serial killer and, well, plenty of dead people. It’s full of references to 70s and 80s movies and music, of tropes constantly played upon (the FBI agent with a bottle problem, the small town setting with its lot of people all knowing *something*, the serial killer escaped from an asylum…), and there’s no doubt that this could be easily turned into a movie as well, since its format is basically the same.
There’s lots of humour, lots of gore as well, and action of the cheesy type, that made me snicker on a regular basis. The characters are mostly stereotypes, obviously, but at least everybody gets their share of it: even though at first, I thought “my, the women are all underdogs here”, the guys don’t fare better, and end up the same way. The asylum part was definitely funny in a sort of gross way, as doubt was sown as to who was actually running it, and a certain FBI agent decided to show an inmate who was the boss. It’s… special, but it still made me laugh.
There *is* a plot, too, in spite of the apparent whatever-goes road the story takes at first. It’s not just random killing here and there. The Red Mohawk does have a plan and an objective, and let’s say there’s method to his madness.
An issue for me—which may have been an issue with my copy, but is perhaps still in the published book—was the half-done editing. I noticed too many mistakes and typos (affect instead of effect, grammar mistakes, repetitive expressions) that kept pulling me out of the story. While I enjoyed the latter, the writing style itself wasn’t that great. Also, the story seemed to peter out a little by the end, as if it was being rushed to its conclusion.
Nevertheless, in spite of the issues in style and editing, this novel provided me with a hefty dose of fun. 3.5 stars out of 5.