“Recommended to us by many people, including Gordon Highland, this book delivers. It’s a great little post-apocalyptic tale about a man who finds himself the pawn in a dangerous game, and what he does to stay alive, get the girl, and steal the goat.”

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“Chandler’s heroes have to fight the system to get some resolution and Bergen’s hero is no different. He’s only doing the job to pay his sick wife’s hospital bills, and he never gets to see her. He lives with the nagging fear of being “relocated” but somehow can’t keep his acerbic mouth shout. He’s constantly in trouble with authority, despite being in authority himself. And just as in Chandler’s novels, the hero’s instincts usually turn out to be correct.

“Ultimately however what makes this book a good read is not plot nor form, but observation, wit and dialogue.

“In the background of a wasteland, Bergen makes as many allusions to film as T.S. Eliot made to literature. There’s a useful “Encylopedia Tobacciana” at the end of the novel which you can check out if you’re not sure what a reference is to, and similarly a glossary for the slang contained in the novel. These add to the sense of the quirky, as does the calligraphy in the book itself and the typeset. Chandler could perhaps be scratching his head about some of this, safe up in heaven-dead, but his own writing always struck me as kind of idiosyncratic, and we’re living in different times now, brother. In a modern age of conspiracies and corporate agglomerates, I think he’d be pleased as to where Bergen has taken his legacy…

Read More: http://zouchmagazine.com/tobacco-stained-mountain-goat-a-novel-by-andrez-bergen-and-a-conversation-with-the-writer/

“Floyd, it has to be said, is a very reluctant hero and would rather nurse a bottle of cheap vodka and prescription meds lying on his sofa than avenging his wife’s death. But this damaged man who seemingly has had his freedom of choice and liberty taken away somehow manages to make you believe that he can make a difference in this horrible, deluded and damaged world.

“I love how multi-layered Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat is, not like a huge sandwich filled with peperami, cheese, tomato, lettuce, chicken and bacon but more like a huge bowl of broth full of every kind of vegetable, bean, rice and barley that you’ve every known in your life. Every spoonful brings a different flavour and texture and the aroma is just divine.”

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“Floyd is admirably tough and lovable, which takes some strength in a world where people get snatched away for no good reasons thanks to corporate greed and politics. He manages to pull himself from a helpless position in his world to a position of power to try and save people he cares about as well as society in general… at least, whatever’s left of it, soggy with acid rain and scarred by struggling to grow in a dying world. What’s scary, though, is that aside from just a little bit of futuristic cosmetic surgery and a few other things, you could look around at the current global climate and see this mess be a real possibility.

That gives me just enough of a spine-chill to hope certain company executives never read this tale, and that humanity hasn’t been consumerized into (near) extinction just yet.”

READ MORE @ The Kindle Book Review

“Witty and literate, the book skips along at a lively pace… Floyd is a likeable character, the low down gumshoe in need of a quick buck and a shot of whisky is a familiar trope, and Bergen gets the voice and accent just right. The story does go a little off kilter at times, meandering rather than setting out any true destination, but it is the ride rather than the finishing line that makes this a fun read. It’s certainly no worse than trying to understand the plot holes in many of the best Bogart movies.”

READ MORE @ The British Fantasy Society

“I can’t remember the title of the short story (possibly ‘Il Desinenza’, which roughly translates as The Termination in Italian) though the current protagonist Floyd was still Floyd then; the weather was just as bad, he still fended off rain with a newspaper, and the joint influences of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out, and my ‘60s/’70s comic book heritage hung pretty obviously onto my coattails.

“Back then, as the story wraps itself up, it’s a Controller—a Seeker’s nemesis already—who does the dirty work and affects termination. “Next time, shoot straight,” I recall penning as Floyd’s cynical quip while he cleans up the mess.

“Somewhere en route along the past twenty-odd years it’s become Floyd whose aim and life is amiss, and we added about 200 pages into the mix.

“I say ‘we’ because my erstwhile collaborator over the past three years of the novel’s gestation has been my editor Kristopher Young – the author of Click – who’s invested so much of his own ideas that the story has definitely shaped up as collusion.

“But I’m getting ahead of myself, which I have a propensity to do; you may also have discovered that I tend to waffle a lot and use semicolons unwisely.

“After the short story was written I shelved it for several years. The ideas continued fermenting somewhere in my coin-locker brain, until 1992 when I resurrected the romp while I was living in Richmond, in Melbourne (Australia), and extended it to a 162-page manuscript. I still have that version in a drawer next to my desk here in Tokyo—it’s all dog-eared and there’re different typefaces within the same tome as I started out on my mum’s electric typewriter, which of course ran out of ink, then graduated to my partner’s dad’s boxy, black-and-white screened Apple Macintosh with a dot matrix printer.

“I remember scratching my head at the time, trying to nut out a half-decent title, and came up with We Are Not Afraid, We Serve. It always was a half-hearted moniker that lacked pizzazz. I was 27 at the time and I do cringe now when I look back at much of this.”

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“The prose is solidly tough-guy style, more noir than sci-fi, with technical terms kept to a minimum, yet the Blade Runner-like futuristic world of corruption is never too far away. This novel has enough twists and turns to keep a Raymond Chandler fan happy. There are echoes of Total Recall, and any novel where the main character goes in search of another character named Wilton Parmenter and instead finds one named Agarn is bound to entertain fans of 1960s TV.”

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“Oh, and on a final note, you will thoroughly enjoy the company of the protagonist, Floyd Maquina – he is ruggedly handsome and generally ruined; witty, self destructive and self-effacing with his air of gracious defeat. He has a weary charm that is impossible to resist. If only he were real…”

READ MORE HERE:
http://theflawedmind.com/2011/10/19/tobacco-stained-mountain-goat-a-bleak-but-entertaining-melbourne/