Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat is set in a post-apocalyptic Melbourne, Australia, so right off the bat I’m hooked. I can’t tell you what a thrill it was to be reading a book set in my hometown, especially a post-apocalyptic version of it! (the closest I’ve come is the comic Kranburn by Ben Michael Byrne).

Most of the rest of the world is gone and Melbourne is often referred to as ‘the last city’. The rich and famous live comfortably opulent lives inside the Dome, which covers what used to be the Melbourne CBD. The poor and unwanted are forced to live in the harsh world outside the Dome, where crime is rife, the pollutants in the sky block 99% of the sun’s light, and acid rain is almost always falling. It is essentially a totalitarian state, where the Brazil-like government utilizes Blade Runner style Seekers to hunt down ‘Deviants’.
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What a great way to finish off the year. Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat popped up as one of the novels-of-2012 thanks to the people at Dark Wolf’s Fantasy Reviews: “One of the best discoveries of 2012, Andrez Bergen’s debut novel is a delight, both for the noir/post-apocalyptic story and the tribute brought to classic movies.”
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Bookshops seem to be one of the endangered species of nowadays. It saddens me, more so since I love walking the bookshops’ aisles in search of new books, be them written by familiar and dear writers or by the new, waiting to be discovered, authors. And when a reader finds himself faced with a name that is a mystery at the time of the search, the cover is one of the things that attract – however the book titles are not to be neglected. This was the case with “Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat”, although the search did not take place in a physical bookshop, a title that allured me towards Andrez Bergen’s debut novel and pushed it on my reading table.
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“Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat was my first novel, published in April last year through Another Sky Press in Portland in the U.S. It’s a mixture of noir detective story with dystopian sci-fi, as much influenced by Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick as it is by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The thing took half my life to cobble together, and I’m not kidding here.”
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“In the first-person narrative of his first novel, his character struggles to fit the black fedora of Harry Lime, of Graham Greene’s The Third Man. And while the narrator nervously tries to describe himself through the movie’s black-and-white images, he jells into shape through his street-smart voice, describing the skank-life in Melbourne’s far off rotting future.”
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“I first wrote Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat as a 4-page short story when I was in my early 20s, and writing was my single passion. Then I kind of got diverted and spread-out with the asides you just mentioned. In 1992 and again in 2001 I fleshed out the story to manuscript form, and then shelved it on both occasions to collect dust. Somehow I dragged it back out in 2007, wiped it down, and began writing Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, the novel, with great help from my editor Kristopher Young at Another Sky Press — who decided to publish it.”
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Some people I know could kill for an original idea.

Other people I know have originality broken down and streaming in their blood. Life’s unfair. Andrez (really, Andrew) Bergen belongs to the second category. He has the Originality Gene in his DNA. TOBACCO-STAINED MOUNTAIN GOAT might be quoting and referencing about a hundred pop culture products, but all put together, it adds up to something you’ve never read before. A twentieth century obsessed law enforcement worker in a secluded city, in a distant and totalitarian future. Yeah, exactly. It’s as crazy as the premise sounds. But beyond being crazy, it’s a bold, borderline reckless experimentation with storytelling.
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Something very strange happened to me recently. I loved a book, thoroughly enjoyed reading it, couldn’t put it down at points, and still have absolutely no idea what the hell was going on. None whatsoever.

Post-apocalyptic Melbourne again. Not my favourite place at all, although in TOBACCO-STAINED MOUNTAIN GOAT we don’t seem to be too far in the future, and we don’t seem to be that far from current day Melbourne, particularly in the way the city is divided into the have’s and the have nots. The division is by way of the Dome – uptown paradise where rampant consumerism and mindless bullshit rules (doesn’t sound all that far-fetched does it?). Outside the Dome we’re talking dangerous, run down, mean streets, bars, fast food, and nasty goings on (another tick in the not that difficult to believe column).
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I’m waaaaaaay later (to the tune, Finder tells me with its ‘file info’ stats, of a whole year) to this than I wanted, and I haven’t yet even finished it, but here’s the non-quite-complete book review for Andrez Bergen’s superbly-titled darkly humourous sci-fi film noir hybrid thing Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat.

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Last year, Andrez Bergen leaped onto the scene with Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, with a cover and title that thoroughly convinced me of the book’s appeal before I’d ever read a page.

This summer, his second book, One Hundred Years of Vicissitude, will be released, and I was lucky enough to get an early look.

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