Book Review: Closing Time at the Sunny-Side-Up BY David Niall Wilson
CLOSING TIME AT THE SUNNY-SIDE UP by David Niall Wilson is a combination crime thriller and near future science fiction novel. It is a Tarantino-esque story of oddball characters, unexpected violence, and a fascinating nihilist story with the MacGuffin of a biofuel that makes all the murder possible. It also has a very subtle pro-environmental message that you wouldn't expect to find in a violent sci-fi comedy.
The premise is that Sam has just murdered someone for reasons he considers to be justified and needs to get himself breakfast in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, in his fugue state, he hands over his gun and confesses his crime to Delilah, a waitress who has had it up to here with her lecherous boss. Delilah takes Sam's actions as an inspiration and murders both her boss as well as the nastiest customer at the Sunny Side-Up.
The sci-fi element enters the story as this is a near-future story where global warming is triggering massive hurricanes across Mexico (and other parts of the world) while a group of academics are nearby, testing their new biofuel that they hope will be a miracle cure for humanity's fossil fuel dependency. What does their biofuel rely on? Human corpses.
The academic group realizes the murderers have left behind a wonderful chance to get data that they'd otherwise require months of paperwork documenting. All the while as Sam decides he and Delilah are partners in crime despite the fact the latter is more than a little crazy.
You can see where this is going.
Basically, this is exactly the sort of crazy crime thriller that its description suggests, and it gets weirder from start to finish. UFOs, deranged morticians, and the mother of all super storms are just some of the things that these oddballs must deal with. It's not the kind of book I normally read but I had a blast with this one. I think it would make a fantastic movie and if you've ever been at a Waffle House after midnight, you know just what sort of insane people hang out there.
I was really intrigued by the sci-fi angle because it does its job very effectively without straying too far into the woods of weirdness. The biofuel is the perfect tool for criminals to kill people and get away with it, dissolving them within moments and leaving just usable gas in its place. The fact our protagonists just misuse it in the most obvious manner possible kind of reflects the kind of reckless stupidity that humanity found itself in its current situation because of.
In short, this book is a wild ride and I think if you want an enjoyable crime drama with a dash of a bleak vision of the future (that feels all too plausible) then this is definitely the book for you. I was a huge fan of David Niall Wilson’s Grail Covenant books and this is a big departure for him but one that definitely works out.
