6 Sick Hipsters

6 Sick Hipsters is a wild ride into the underworld of hip that takes more daring, shocking, bloody turns than Pulp Fiction. Rayo Casablanca pulls no punches. Oh, but you'll take 'em... and love every jolt. ---Kemble Scott, author of the bestselling novel SOMA.

What a fun book. Great and wild ride for a weekend. I wish I was a hipster with a tamed Baboon.

They stalk on spiderlike legs wearing jeans tighter than an old woman's wrinkled shoes. As they are the scourge of Starbucks baristas, so also Hipsters are the bones of this novel, but don't for a minute assume they're the flesh of it. Rayo Casablanca's debut is as dark as it is hilarious, as encapsulating as it is clever. He leads us by the hand so charmingly through places so noir their bars sell bourbon on tap and we're left smiling deftly with two toddler steps after each of his morbid strides. From Paleontological pornography to a gangster called "Tank the Niggatron", 6 Sick Hipsters leaves no stone unturned and when you're not laughing out loud you're silently nodding with a half-shameful envy. Aside from the vinyl and drainpipes the novel stipulates pop-culture trivia like monastic creed and at a swollen and malformed range accepted only by the vicious trend setters themselves. From Thomas Pynchon to The Sisters of Mercy, 6 Sick Hipsters swells with allusions, but ultimately the novel's charm comes from the juxtaposition of iniquitous comedy, sly satire and a subculture fetish, and by his good graces does he do it well. All in all a funny, dark and clever debut.

(this review originally appeared at Dogmatika [dot] com) Someone is killing the Williamsburg, Brooklyn hipster elite, leaving clues only the most sub-culturally attuned can find and decipher. The police don't seem interested in these seemingly random killings, so it is up to the Whole Sick Crew to find the killer before they become one of his next victims. Set amid the mainstream-eschewing world of hipsters, 6 Sick Hipsters is a conspiracy novel more rounded than most, delivering beautiful pacing and a well-defined ensemble cast told in an often self-depreciating style that perfectly compliments the uber-cool mentality of its characters. This, Rayo Casablanca's first novel, is filled with obscure and pop references alike along with intelligent slacker character forms reminiscent of Douglas Coupland's Generation X, though Casablanca's characters are grounded by plot rather than the social criticism. Though Casablanca does dip into witty satire and deep social commentary, he displays more prominently the gun power and buckets of blood consistent with the conspiracy thriller genre. The novel is more apt to develop a beautifully grotesque description of a head being shot: "Cooper's head had been there, all bright teeth and receding hair, and then a nanosecond later--just a jump cut--it was a million bits of corpus colossum and eyeball juice. It was like is smile got so wide and bright that it evaporated the face around it. Poof!" [pg. 168] than to expound upon the contagion of cultural memes: "You have to understand this battle [...] You're not up against a monolithic entity, a bear running at you from the forest. You're fighting for survival against a wave of fads..." [pg. 237] though both do exist, and deliver beautifully. The novel culminates to a revelation of a "trend-war" fought on the battle grounds of consumerism, a topic that could easily suffer the ramblings of nihilist angst and anti-capitalism critiques. These moments do appear, but the reader is never bogged down by tales of cultural woe. Instead we are allowed fresh insight into the buyer/seller mentality. I refer specifically to an especially engaging exchange between the novel's villain and hero toward the end of the story. I won't give it away, but not surprisingly the passage comes during another one of the conspiracy-thriller genre's defining aspects: there's always time for a speech before dying/pulling a trigger. 6 Sick Hipsters carries the rogue camaraderie of Joey Goebel's The Anomalies--punk attitude and hipster lifestyles included--along with a less passive social critique found in Coupland's Generation X. Fans of slick conspiracies and vinyl records rejoice.

This book starts with a JOLT and ends just like you thought it would EXCEPT totally different. Chocked full of action, 6 Sick Hipsters uses analytical dialogue to keep you guessing while radically misguided but ultra hip intellects search for the answers, sort of like your favorite Scooby Doo episode on acid. This book will make you LOL, ponder the power of pop culture, and could possibly give you nightmares. Super fun read.