Noir at the Bar

Noir at the Bar edited by Jedidiah Ayres & Scott Phillips  201 pp.

I decided to see what this book was about after reading a blog that mentioned the hideous cover of this book. To my surprise I found that this book was published to help University City's Subterranean Books out of financial difficulties. The book is a collection of stories that were read by the authors at a "Noir at the Bar" event. From the 1950s cheap novel cover, I was expecting stories that were more along the lines of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Instead, I found a collection of stories that are considerably more violent with no private eyes. Drugs are involved in many stories along with robbery, infidelity, kidnapping, and retaliation. Basically it covers the gamut of crimes that can end in death. There is a minimum of one bloody killing in each story and usually more. The stories are attention grabbing and I found myself zipping through them even though they aren't my usual type of fare.