“Sometimes you wanna go…where everyBODY knows your naaaaame…[and they keep quiet about it!]”
If you’re like me, you don’t read many anthologies. Maybe you like one or two authors who are in it, but you seldom read every story. It just feels a little too A.D.D., you know? But every once in a while you find an antho that breaks the mold with a cool idea, and you keep turning the page even if the character you just read about is no longer involved.
Gallagher has written that anthology, and he did it masterfully.
The Story
From the Amazon description:
The universe can be a rough place, and few places are rougher than Resnick VII. In this far-flung, scantly regulated corner of the system, every killer for hire, private investigator, working stiff and plain old desperate soul comes through the Crossroads Tavern. Boniface Ahern owns the joint, pours the drinks and connects people with problems with people that solve them—for a cut.
Debt collections gone sideways, high society girls disappearing into the night, tragedy, revenge and things man was never meant to know—These are the tales of the Crossroads Tavern regulars; a bunch there ain’t nothin’ ‘regular’ about.
This anthology features four stories that all overlap in the same setting, with a unifying background character who plays a different role in the lives of different protagonists. Think of McAnally’s Pub from The Dresden Files, a place of accorded neutral territory where supernatural beings of varying power levels and loyalties can all hide out or make deals as needed.
The “Crossroads Tavern” is just like that, only this is a cyberpunk setting on a futuristic sci-fi world, where digital saturation exists around every corner, and yet a thriving criminal underworld still persists.
The Characters
Our bartender/tavern keeper/whatever you want to call him is Boniface Ahern. Sometimes he’s a fixer, sometimes he’s a listening ear, he’s a little bit like Chuck Findlay from Burn Notice. He’s whatever you need him to be. That willingness to run a discreet business in the middle of a dangerous underground is what makes him a useful character.
The other characters—Kaz, Rusty, Crasher—are tied up in their own escapades, and they end up needing Boniface’s help in different ways. Sometimes they barge in on his tavern for different reasons. It’s just cool that he’s there and he’s competent when everyone else is panicking, like a borderline religious figure in the middle of a godless setting.
The World
Resnick VII feels like a reliably gritty and grimy world of rusted steel and blinking neon out there in the cosmos. The fact that there’s still so much crime happening speaks to the universal tendencies of man; not only will we always get up to bad stuff, but we’ll always need help to get out of it, and Boniface is the kind of guy you’d want to be able to rely on—whether you need an exorcism for a robot, a lead on a missing woman connected to a wealthy family, or a place to make a stand against a cosmic force of evil.
The cyberpunk setting is familiar enough to be recognizable without having to waste a ton of words on describing it, while its differences are revealed at speed as the stories unfold.
Politics
None.
Content Warning
Plenty of military-grade profanity, and some of the violence can get pretty dark—stabbing, shooting, typical mob stuff.
Who is it for?
If you like McAnally from Dresden, or you want a cluster of overlapping stories that would feel right at home in Cyberpunk 2077, check out CYBERPUB: TALES OF THE CROSSROADS TAVERN REGULARS.
Why buy it
I guess the general conceit of a regular anthology is “bang for your buck,” where you’ll get a ton of different takes on the same idea. CYBERPUB manages to do that while also rewarding a read-through of the entire thing: each story is relevant for what comes next, so you get the rapid pace of an anthology with the satisfaction of a novel. Go check it out!
Thank you so much for the review, brother!
It seems a bit like Spider Robinson's Callahan's Crosstime Saloon? (And is Resnick VII's name an homage to Mike (RIP) )?