Night of the Long Knives

By: Fritz Leiber / Narrated By: Matt Armstrong

Length: 3 hrs and 17 mins

Had a whole LOT of Yowza! in it… dunno, maybe tooooo much?

Look, I just saw this audiobook, maestro Fritz Leiber’s Night of the Long Knives, saw that it was post-apocalypse, and I thought of a New Accomplice’s favorite genres. No zombies… thank good golly gosh! so p’raps it’d be a charmingly horrific nightmare to dip my toe into. And? It’s in the public domain so it was free on Kindle with a $2.99 audiobook charge, so gritty + cheeeeap? Dude, I was so THERE!

First published in 1960, whilst all were twitchy about the Cold War, this story opens with one of our protagonists, Ray, plodding along, bedecked with all SORTS of weaponry, as he traverses a radiation wasteland that massive nuclear war has brought. He avoids green dust devils, he observes almost complete dead bodies (Radiation has killed whatever bacteria might aid decomposition), and he ponders the two things, the two thoughts that fill the heads of survivors who roam the Deathlands: God, I wanna kill; and God, I wanna have sex with someone… and then maybe kill them. Apparently, nuclear devastation has kinda sorta tweaked the brains of the roaming survivors.

Along comes a young woman, rare in the Deathlands, scarred by radiation and possible murder attempts (My take), and right away Ray is thinking that Urge No. 2 juuuust might happen. As they begin eyeing each other, they start a complicated dance of disarming, a laying down of weapons to show that for now murder is NOT the option. After they’ve addressed Urge No. 2, Ray starts thinking about: Okay, is noooow the time for Urge No. 1, the destroying of the other, to come into play?

At that moment, several things happen at once in the story: A sort of plane/craft crash-lands and a tall and fine gentleman emerges from the craft. Urge No. 1 is fulfilled when both Ray and the young woman brutally murder the guy, and an oldster of a man joins them quite suddenly. He’s to be called Pops, and he wrangles Alice as the name of the young woman.

Okay, so then things just fly by in the story. There’s hope for a better place to fly to in this anti-gravity craft, there’s a war they’re thrust into, Pops reveals that he’s an Ex-Homicidal Maniac and belongs to a 12-step program called Murderers Anonymous, plague is discovered, and both Ray and Alice question their own homicidal instincts as they continue to unburden themselves of their horror histories to the ever-patient, ever-kinda-preachy Pops. And not to do the whole SPOILER thing, but seriously. I listened to this all in one sitting, my brain getting popped right and left as new things were thrown at me, and it all wound up with me thinking this was sooooo very much the first story in what was certainly a series.

Uhm, it’s not…

This is a standalone story, and we have to make do with an ending that’ll either inspire thought or will disappoint with the many loose ends and new questions asked. So, dunno how I feel about something that piques so much interest, that has soooo much going on in it, and all of it comes to a sudden >thunk< with its clanging ending.

Then too, Matt Armstrong’s narration was sorely lacking in an ability to convey grit and murderous mayhem. Ray, a tough guy, blusters away with conversations fraught with slang and those grammatically incorrect double negatives, a real tough guy, and Armstrong portrays this all with smooth and even tones. Pops, an elderly ex-murderer, sermonizes in those same tones even as he’s relaying the devastation he’s caused in his past. And Alice, who has a stump instead of a hand, screws in a hook OR a knife into it, cuz that’s the kinda bloodthirsty survivalist she is: Hard scrabble voice from Armstrong? Nope, smooth tones. So I felt the performance, tho’ earnest, wasn’t in keeping with the text.

Okay okay, all that said, this was at least quite engaging, and it did rather make me think, posited philosophical life and death questions, introduced us to a wasteland that really seemed like it COULD happen back with the 1960’s dilemmas and national posturing going on. And I did like Pops a lot, and I liked that it all ended with a resounding bit of Hope in such a dire environment, with the question of: Can we be redeemed no matter what we’ve done?

Come for a radioactive post-apocalypse, stay for the homicidal musings, dismiss the even-keel narration. But mostly?

Jiminy H. Cricket! The $2.99 audiobook can’t be beat!