THE MAN IN THE DARK SUIT by Dennis Caro (1980)

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Listen, this isn’t a good book. In fact, it’s quite bad. Nonetheless, the peculiar way in which its bad eventually worked a mystifying magic. And the next thing I knew, the weird narrative incongruity (discussing people we’ve never met with a casual assumption of familiarity, the ‘Am I sure this isn’t the fourth book in a series?’ drop-in cognitive estrangement), the endless banter (intended as flirtation or provocation or misdirection, who knows?), the nonsensical free association that must be read as dream logic (pg 108: “The bedspread was a dark royal blue. The heavy cruiser Coggins lay in port, riding easy between the gentle security of his anchor chain in the swell at the morning tide. Only his innate sense for for survival [bass guitar, five gallon jug] saved him. The dreaded kamikaze hippopotamus dove at him out of the sun. He rolled over onto his stomach, feeling for the edge of the bed with one hand, covering his head with the other. Bernstein landed beside him.”), the complex financial speculation central to the strangely unarticulated plot, and the alternate world cyberpunk miasma pushed me to start moving at an almost tolerable clip and then the final page turned itself, and I basked in the finality of the thing and confidence that I caught either 40% of a masterpiece or a stray to the face from the unread flotsam of 70s sf.