BlackLung by Chris Wright 2012

            Now that I’m writing about it, I look back and realize that the Blacklung universe was very very strange, and I think I took it pretty lightly while I was reading it. For starters, it was violent; a child gets murdered by a street person within the first few pages. Although, at the time it didn’t seem too shocking, partly because of the illustration style. They all kind of look like ragdolls with some of the faces stitched together with different pieces of cloth, and everyones hands and feet were significantly larger than their heads, all of which made it all cartoonish and underplayed all the violence. With pirates and street thugs, Blacklung was straight out of a 10-year old boy’s imagination. The story’s protagonist is a rather jaded schoolteacher who seems unaffected when he hears about the child murder. This event though seemingly unrelated actually causes him to end up in the bad part of town right when a couple of gang members are executing a plan to assassinate another gang member. The protagonist and his associate, who is also partly to blame for their ending up here, are caught in the ensuing scuffle. The associate is murdered while the protagonist is kidnapped and taken aboard a pirate ship where he spends the remainder of the novel. There are few aboard the ship who protect him from the others. He eventually get’s on the captains good side when it is discovered that he is literate. The captain employs him to take dictation for his memoirs. As if he had a choice, the schoolteacher tags along with the pirates while they do pirate things, rape, pillage, murder, etc. Eventually all the notable characters, save the schoolteacher, go mad or get murdered or both, leaving the teacher, for all practical purposes, alone. He has no ties to any of the other pirate who are still alive and as a result they decide to leave him on an island. End novel. It was an interesting read but I’m not sure I got anything insightful from it.