The book’s title is one which caused me to do a dou­ble take when I saw it. Gun Machine is such an unusual flop­ping of word order. Isn’t it sup­posed to be “Machine Gun”? In so many ways, this jux­ta­po­si­tion is a per­fect lead in for the novel.

I’ve never been a big comic book fan. My read­ings have always been the main­stream ones, Bat­man, Spi­der­man, and even… Richie Rich. Look, as a lit­tle kid, I really enjoyed the Richie Rich sto­ries. I’m not proud of it, but there it is. Being that I’m not a comic book guy, I never really knew about War­ren Ellis until just a few years ago. I think it was Boing Boing which intro­duced me to him, and since then I’ve fol­lowed him online and sub­scribed to his blog. So when I heard about his new novel: Gun Machine, I knew I needed to add it to my already tow­er­ing stack of books to read.

Yes­ter­day, tak­ing advan­tage of a quiet morn­ing I sat down and sub­merged myself in the Gun Machine. We’re intro­duced to John Tal­low, or ‘Tal­low’ as he’s most fre­quently referred to in the novel, is a cop with an unusual love of his­tory and books and a loner. He also goes out of his way to be a loner. He never even met the wife of his part­ner over the 18 months they worked together. His cop car is loaded down with books, papers, and print outs such that it actu­ally occu­pies much of the car’s back seat. We learn that Tal­low is a cop who’s over it, or quite nearly over it.

Oppo­site Tal­low we’re intro­duced to ‘The Hunter,’ a mys­tic or mad man — we’re never quite sure — who lives in New York City along­side Tal­low. Where Tal­low lives in the day­light, The Hunter exists in the shad­ows of the city going so far as to map and track CCTV cam­eras such that he can travel the city with min­i­mal expo­sure. He sees the city in a dis­ori­ent­ing hybrid of real­ity and some pre-civilized grass-covered land­scape and repeat­edly we see him deal with men­tal dis­cord as some anachro­nism rushes through the oppo­site set­ting such as a car careen­ing through a pas­toral val­ley. We’re unsure for much of the book what exactly the story and truth around this mys­te­ri­ous per­son is, and Ellis mas­ter­fully unfolds his story along­side Tallow’s own dis­cov­er­ies. What we learn quickly is that The Hunter is a mas­ter­ful killer with no con­science to speak of.

The inter­sec­tion between Tal­low and The Hunter is the book’s tit­u­lar ref­er­ence, a room filled with guns. Not just a closet or work­shop but a full apart­ment unit which has its walls cov­ered with guns arranged in inter­lock­ing patterns.

After Tallow’s part­ner and he answer a call con­cern­ing a naked and armed apart­ment res­i­dent, a fate­ful shot­gun blast reveals the room of guns. Here is a won­der­ful trailer for the book below nar­rated by Wil Wheaton and drawn by Ben Tem­ple­smith. The video is an excerpt from the novel where the room of guns is dis­cov­ered and described.

Joss Whe­don has said that, in his mind, Seren­ity was one of the main char­ac­ters on Fire­fly. I find myself feel­ing the same way about the gun room in Gun Machine. So cen­tral is it to the plot and the story, so impor­tant for how it holds this plot’s web together, it would be a major fal­lacy to over­look how cru­cial this room is. Even after the room itself is dis­as­sem­bled and col­lected for evi­dence, Tal­low recon­structs the room using pho­tos such that he can recre­ate the effect the room had on him. They lay out pho­tos and print­ings of the guns, paper­ing walls and the floor in the CSU build­ing, such that he is able to do “cop voodoo.” The Hunter was forced to watch as his cre­ation was dis­as­sem­bled, repeat­edly he con­sid­ers storm­ing in and sim­ply killing the peo­ple dis­as­sem­bling his mas­ter­piece, only to stop him­self out of a desire to remain unseen.

The dis­cov­ery of this room reopens hun­dreds of closed cold-case files. An event which, even when the police force had the man­power, would prove daunt­ing. Dur­ing a time where the cops are strapped for peo­ple and money (which is always it seems) it becomes a polit­i­cal chess piece. Tallow’s lieu­tenant despite her appar­ent fond­ness for Tal­low, saw his dimin­ish­ing will for the job and decided to hang the alba­tross of a room around his neck and let him be the fall guy for it. One man ver­sus hun­dreds of cold cases ver­sus a true bogey-man of a ser­ial killer. We dis­cover that despite her expec­ta­tion that he will fail, she sup­ports him and even the Cap­tain of the precinct sup­ports him even though he expects fail­ure and the case to be the executioner’s axe.

The dis­cov­ery of the room also leads Tal­low into a web that goes beyond just the 200 mur­ders, it uncov­ers a larger plot with more impor­tant play­ers. But, despite that, it is still cen­tral to these two men — Tal­low and The Hunter.

The city that Ellis por­trays is a grim, bloody, ani­mal­is­tic city. Tal­low lis­tens to the police scan­ner while he dri­ves and thus is con­stantly awash in the hor­ri­ble things hap­pen­ing around the city. There are sto­ries of rapes, murder-suicides, rob­beries, and more. It’s a city vastly darker than the glam­orous New York so often shown even in the cop shows on TV. This is a city that I would be ter­ri­fied to go out in lest I end up on the wrong end of a mugging.

This sort of mys­tery is the one I most enjoy where it isn’t a mat­ter of find­ing the key to solv­ing it, it’s a mat­ter of focus. We, as a reader, know we have the frame and per­spec­tive, it’s only as Ellis care­fully shows us what we’re look­ing at does it snap into focus.

It’s a quick read, with 280 pages, I fin­ished it in a sin­gle morn­ing. The nar­ra­tive moves quickly and I def­i­nitely felt the pull to con­tinue at the end of each chap­ter. I encour­age you to read this book if you like mys­ter­ies or enjoy Ellis’ graphic novels.

It’s also worth not­ing that the rights for the book have already been sold to Fox, so per­haps we’ll see John Tal­low face the Hunter on TV. I could see it being the basis for a crime pro­ce­dural series, or maybe just a movie. But we’ll see if it pops up in the next few years.

Let me know what you think! I tried to keep this review spoiler-free despite the con­stant tug­ging for me to dive deeper into the plot. Shoot me an email

Other Reviews:

• New York Times by Charles McGrath
• Publisher’s Weekly by Jason Starr (on Warren’s blog)
• The Inde­pen­dent by Laura Sneddon
• The AV Club by Phil Dyess-Nugent

Header image from 1yen on Flickr.