It seemed like Mamatas didn't like any of his characters and was prolonging their discomfort toward no particular end. On the plus side there is an interesting mix of leftist and occult subcultures and a dreary sense of place that feels authentic. I had high expectations but just, bleh.

A little bit noir, a little bit fantasy, Love is the Law is a hot little book about Harriet the Spy turned punk in late 80s Long Island, investigating the death of her Socialist lover/mentor with a magick edge to proceedings. Put out by Dark Horse in the throwback format of the classic pulps - small, cheap and with cool cover art - it immediately appealed to me from the shelves of one the more interesting local indie book shops, in a sea of homogeneous bland books for the masses produced in as l...

No. Just no. If he doesn't have it right, he doesn't get to write about it as if he knows what he's talking about. The rest comes across as pseudo-hipster to me. I know this book is getting higher stars from others but this is just a huckster.

This book would have to be described as a cheap, tawdry, pulp crime novel set on the fringes, literally and figuratively, of a picturesque North Shore Long Island town. To me, there was too much violence, sex portrayed as analogous to a handshake, according to the protagonist, the punk Dawn - not everything needs to be shown/described. I suppose this is the sort of fiction that is turned into hit movies, like the Tarantino films. I never liked the Tarantino films, though, so it's unsurprising th...

This book shouldn't have been something I enjoyed, full of things I know little about: Aleister Crowley, punk culture, late 80s suburban ennui... I do like a good mystery, some noir, and I was a teenager at one point. (Not a girl and certainly not at all like Dawn, the protagonist of "Love Is the Law.")But this was a great read. Dawn was complex -- a "fucking genius" outsider who needs to reason out the connections between insiders and the people she has tried so hard to be invisible to. She's g...

Excellent Punk rock crime/mystery set in the late 80's Long Island featuring a main character who is into Alister Crowley and Trotskyism. Unique to say the least. Full review coming.

There’s a lot of Thelemic hoo-ha in Nick Mamatas’ new noir novel Love Is The Law, and I am fine with that, since for a good portion of the ‘00s I ran with as gnarly a pack of wannabe Crowley-ites and ritual occultists as you could ask for. I’ve had about as much of that as a person can stand, which is to say I get the stuff, and the fastbreeding esoteric patter of narrator “Golden” Dawn Seliger is tone-perfect in this book. You don’t have to get Thelema or understand where Dawn is coming from to...

One of the most abrasive, engaging modern fantasy novels I've ever read. Dawn Seliger challenges your notion of "likeable" protagonists by sinking her teeth into you in the first chapter and then dragging you on a gutter-level tour of late 80s Long Island.The plot advances through a lot of coincidences, which would sink a lesser novel. But Mamatas embroils the narrator and her POV in such a dense haze of Aleister Crowley and arch occultism that it works. If you truly believe that there are no co...

I have no idea what the Hell I just read.But I really enjoyed it. One of those books you have to read for yourself because any description will sound like a cover blurb by someone who hasn't read it.

If you want a light and edifying read with likeable protags, you've come to the wrong writer, sister. If, on the other hand, you have an interest in punk culture of decades past and breezy thriller/mysteries, this one is a quick, cool read. In fact, you'll spend as much time reading this as a Harlequin Presents, but Love is the Law is 10 times more fun. Guaranteed. Until the day when Mamatas writes an actual Harlequin Presents. At which point reality will implode.Buy it.

Terrific. Fabulous, and with a lot of growth in it: Aaron Cometbus meets Cory Doctorow. Set in Long Island. Seriously.(How does fiction exist without a sense of time and place? My book of stories, which took seven years to complete 22 of, required Portland. Too much is made, snarkily and cavilierly, about people moving to New York and thinking they're Bukowski and staying at the Chelsea in order to do anything blah-blah-blah ... too little is made about how generic most fiction is, as though any...

I've been reading epic fantasy because I'm writing it, and Christ have I been bogged down. I don't know what it is about EF, but so many authors are so fucking slack. Do I want to read two pages of a description of a valley the characters will never revisit? Do I want to read 50 pages of the protagonist doing exactly what he's told without any agency at all? I do not. What's more, I'm not reading casual or bottom level books; these are epic fantasies that people rave about here and elsewhere. Po...

"His accent, all lispy and nasal as though mixing Brooklyn, Long Island, and the sounds of mental retardation, gave it away."Fuck this book. Terminated. With prejudice.

Nick's done an excellent job of feeding you the bits you need, when you need them. Dawn is a communist punk rock occultist investigating the murder of her mentor-cum-cummer, and the more this "fucking genius" (her words, not mine) digs, the more intertwined the murder's whole backstory gets. Most of the characters are very well put together, but there's a couple that feel inserted in a deus ex machina fashion. The magick is dealt with in a fashion I dug and the complexity of his protagonist is e...

Love is the Law is the first book by Mamatas that I've read and it certainly won't be the last. An extremely weird tale about a punk rock girl whose world gets turned upside-down when she finds her mentor dead of an apparent suicide. Now that the man who taught her the ways of Marxism, especially by means of Trotsky, and the occult is dead, and the Soviet Bloc is collapsing, she sets out to avenge her mentors (she is convinced) murder. This is the setup, and from here it only gets stranger. It's...

Dawn Seliger is Andromeda Klein's fucked up sibling. Three cultural hallmarks of 1989 that Mamatas got so right:1. van art2. Batman (dir. Tim Burton) as overriding artifact of the year3. Rosemary RogersGreat thing about the ending: (view spoiler)[girl does not live happily ever after with boy(s). (hide spoiler)]Happy St. Patrick's day!

Nick Mamatas is smarter than you. So is his main character in "Love is the Law"How you feel about that is your problem, for both of them really. Nick as a writer isn't one to hold your hand or make you feel comfortable. He's there to take you to the places he wants to explore and you keep up or you get left behind. His protagonist Dawn is very similar. She makes no effort to make herself sympathetic or likable or, in the end even in the service of the story. She's entirely self-directed and you

"Love is the Law" is Mamatas at his best, an amazing mix of noir, atmosphere, and character that I recommend for anyone who likes when everyday people become detectives but hates how those kinds of novels are often tame. This is my favorite recent book set in the 80s because it captures what it was like to be me, which is unusual for any book...We need a time machine so Dawn Seliger can be played by Ally Sheedy in a film directed by 80s David Lynch with Kenneth Anger shooting some establishing s...

Really hate to bag on a book that has so many great reviews but I am not feeling it and had to force myself to read through to the end. First offense is that I wasn't buying that this narrator was a woman and no details in her biography would make me believe in the voice. Still, aside from that detail, the voice had power. The plot, however, was pretty ridiculous, and just having the narrator intimate that there are no coincidences doesn't let Mamatas off the hook. At the sentence level the writ...

In a word: Bullshit. Painfully obvious from the very first line that this supposedly strong female character is in fact being written from the mind of a man. I got eleven pages in before quitting in disgust.