NightSide — (2003-2012) Publisher: John Taylor was born in the Nightside — a city within the city of London where it's always three A.M. and where inhuman creatures and otherworldly gods walk side-by-side. It's the stomping grounds for the lost and missing — and John Taylor is an expert at finding people and things in the shadows.
   
 
     
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 Something From the Nightside
I picked up Something From the Nightside on Jim Butcher's recommendation and I enjoyed it for what it was: not high literature, but a fast fun read.
John Taylor is a private detective with a gift for finding things. He takes a case about a missing girl that forces him to confront his past and enter the Nightside. John Taylor has a serious reputation in the Nightside and he thought he had left that world behind years ago. Now it seems he has to return, and he uses his old contacts and his dubious reputation to crack the case.
Simon R. Green does a very good job of giving you the feel of the Nightside. I like the world he created — it's a creative mix of a lot of dark fantasy places we've seen before. Overall the story was fun and fast-paced. The cast of violent self-loathing characters, although colorful, got tiresome after awhile, but there are hints of more depth to come in future volumes.
Green’s writing style in this novel is cliché to the point that it starts to feel repetitive. He successfully recreates the private eye noir style, but at times I just wanted him to stop the constant reaffirmation of the Nightside’s weirdness:
- The Nightside is the secret, hidden, dark heart of the city. London's evil twin. It's where the really wild things are….
- It's always night in the Nightside. It's always three o'clock in the morning, and the dawn never comes….
- You can buy or sell anything in the Nightside, and no-one asks questions. No-one cares. There's a nightclub, where you can pay to see a fallen angel forever burning inside a pentacle drawn in baby's blood.
- Everything you ever feared or dreamed of is running loose somewhere in the shifting streets of the Nightside….
- You can find anything in the Nightside, if it doesn't find you first. It's a sick, magical, dangerous place….
That’s just from first half of chapter one; repeat similar descriptions ad nauseum throughout the entire book. I get it: the Nightside is a creepy, weird, and scary place. Please move on with the story. I’m hoping that since this is the first book in a series and the setting has now been established, that we can move on from describing what's "in the Nightside" all the time.
Something from the Nightside should provide urban fantasy fans a great way to spend their time. I am definitely looking forward to the next books. —Justin Blazier
 Agents of Light and Darkness
Agents of Light and Darkness, the second book in Simon R. Green‘s Nightside, once again follows the almost always abstruse John Taylor, the private detective who is really good at finding things. In Something From the Nightside we learned that John is a former Nightside badass who developed a conscious during his time away from the Nightside and returned to help someone in need. Agents of Light and Darkness follows a similar premise, except on a larger scale. This time it's the Nightside itself that's really in danger. Heaven and Hell are at war and John is stuck in between. He must locate the Unholy Grail before time runs out and the Nightside becomes collateral damage.
I liked Agents of Light and Darkness more than the first book. I always try to read at least two books of a series before truly deciding if I like it or not. In Agents of Light and Darkness, Simon R. Green takes the hyperbole that annoyed me so much from the first book and tones it down a level or two. He spends less time talking about how wild, crazy, and scary his world is and more time developing the characters that so desperately needed expanding.
This is a short book (as are most of the Nightside books) and a very enjoyable read. The pacing is much like the first — fast and fun. There are a ton of cool and colorful characters such as Suzie Shooter, Razor Eddie, The Collector, and many more. I look forward to seeing how these characters develop through the series. If you enjoy a fast-paced urban fantasy, try the Nightside series. —Justin Blazier
Nightingale’s Lament
The Nightside stories are so hard boiled that it’s hard to put in perspective, but I’m going to try anyway: If you took Dashiell Hammett’s corpse, rolled it in batter, then deep fried it till black, you would have a pretty good approximation of what Simon R. Green is going for.
Nightingale’s Lament is the third book in the Nightside series, and follows the same pattern as the previous books do: basically, another case file for John Tayler. This time he’s been tasked to discover the cause of the mysterious suicides surrounding a young singer’s performances. Through the course of the mystery he once again uses his reputation to help him solve the case. And, as usual, Simon R. Green throws some new and fascinating characters into the mix.
With each Nightside installment, Green’s writing gets tighter, and his world gets more exciting. The gritty fast-paced style is really starting to grow on me. Nightingale’s Lament is full of memorable lines, which I’ll call Taylorisms. For example:
- I don't use guns. Never have. They have too many limitations.
- That man could brood for the Olympics, and pick up a bronze in self-pity while he was at it.
- Condiments, Never leave home without them
Those are just a few of many great quotes. The book’s tone is almost always tongue-in-cheek, but it remains just serious enough to keep the suspense high. Green has something special with the Nightside series. I hope he continues to improve the narrative, and keeps entertaining me for years to come.
—Justin Blazier
 The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny
One of the most memorable settings in all of fantasy literature is Simon R. Green’s Nightside, where it's always 3AM and you can buy everything, including slightly shop-soiled souls if you're willing to pay the price.
In the tenth book of this terrific series, Simon R. Green once again showcases his amazing talent. Fans of the series will be excited to learn that The Good, the Bad and the Uncanny contains the final showdown between our protagonist, hardened PI John Taylor, and the Nightside’s ultimate authority figure, Walker, which comes to a conclusion I enjoyed very much — but I’m not telling.
What's not to like? At times, Green's strength becomes almost a weakness. He has been at this long enough that he can create whole lists of colorful characters doing insane things — and he frequently does. At times, it can become an (admittedly entertaining) distraction from the plot and characters, which are, as always, strong.
While we’re on the subject of minor quibbles, I’ve been distracted throughout the series by Green’s overuse of certain words (such as “appalling”). But you know, there may be a reason I review books. If anyone doesn’t explore the Nightside series because of that, you’re missing out on a real treat. If you are new to the series, I do recommend that you start at the beginning rather than with book ten. You'll be glad you did. —Stephen Frank
The Bride Wore Black Leather
The Bride Wore Black Leather starts off with John Taylor walking along Nightside’s streets on the way to his office, a place he rarely goes. At first I thought that Simon R Green was taking his time because this is the reportedly the final NIGHTSIDE novel. As the chapter progressed, though, I realized that John Taylor the character was saying farewell, as he leaves behind one aspect of his life and moves into unfamiliar ones, first as Nightside’s new Walker, or agent of the shadowy Authorities who run the place, and secondly as a husband and father. Nightside, where it’s always three a.m., where dimensions, realities and timelines intersect and collide, where for a price you can have your heart’s desire or your worst nightmare and they are often the same thing, will never be the same for John after tonight.
Taylor asks his secretary Cathy for one last private detective case, something he can finish up before he fully assumes his duties as Walker. Cathy immediately sees through this and points out that most likely Taylor just needs to get out of the hair of his bride-to-be, Suzie, the most fearsome bounty hunter in Nightside. Suzie goes by Suzie Shooter, Shotgun Suzie, or sometimes, “Geez, it’s her! Run!” Taylor and Suzie are a perfect match; she is a professional killer and he is the man who will do the hard things. John and Suzie are poised on the brink of happiness. That sounds too good to be true, and it is.
The book’s pacing is a little strange. The first three chapters are basically a self-contained NIGHTSIDEnovella. Taylor crashes the Ball of Forever, a party held annually by the Immortals. A murder takes place — coincidentally, the victim is one of the Authorities — and by the end of Chapter Three Taylor has solved it. Several of Taylor’s sidekicks and enemy/allies show up; Razor Eddie, the Punk God of the Knife; Dead Boy; and the Oblivion Brothers.
Chapter Four kicks off as John is pulled out of his own stag party by Julien Advent, the Great Victorian Adventurer, who ended up in Nightside as the result of falling into a timeslip, and stayed there and is now the editor of the local tabloid. Julien is also an Authority, and needs Taylor’s help to stop a man who calls himself the Sun King and is connected to the mysterious graffito, “Let the sunshine in,” that has been showing up around town. It’s always 3 a.m. in Nightside, and the sun does not shine. Clearly Advent knows more than he is saying, since he and the Sun King knew each other in San Francisco during the Summer of Love. After weeks of performing miracles in San Francisco in 1967, the Sun King entered a mysterious white tower and vanished. Now he is back, angry and appalled at the corruption of the flower-power dream, and augmented by beings he calls The Entities. He plans to put the world right, starting by bringing back the sun, turning Nightside into Sunnyside. Nightside may be our world’s Bad Part of Town, but it is also our last line of defense against other realities and dimensions who want to annex, or consume, Earth.
Taylor is determined to stop the Sun King, but soon a beloved Nightside resident is dead and the Sun King has framed Taylor for the death. He is on the run with every hand turned against him, even his fiancée’s:
“You’d better stay out of this, Suzie, I can handle it.”
“Of course you can. Where are you, John?”
It was the second time she’d asked, and something in her voice made the hackles rise up on the back of my neck. “Why do you want to know, Suzie?”
“Because the Authorities hired me to track you down,” said Shotgun Suzie. “My biggest bounty ever.”
“And you said yes?”
It’s a really big reward,” said Suzie. “Biggest I’ve ever been offered. And it is what I do best. It’s a matter of professional pride, John. I can’t let someone else get to you first.”
John Taylor pushes himself harder in this book than any previous book, doing physical and spiritual damage to himself in his quest to save Nightside and his own life. The book takes us on a tour of Nightside as John visits many familiar places. He tries to go to the HP Lovecraft Memorial Library….
…only to find it wasn’t there. It was only then that I remembered hearing that the Library had recently vanished and been replaced by a doppelganger from some alternate dimension. The Linda Lovelace Library of Spiritual Erotica. Takes all sorts…
He uses some magic that is new to us, like an incandescent salamander ball to disperse a shadowy demon that threatens him.
I have known people to get really snotty about salamander balls, saying they’re expensive, you don’t get much bang for your buck, and they’re a bit on the small side. But as I always point out, you only get two to a salamander.
Taylor’s choices get narrower and narrower until he confronts the Sun King in the last place he wants to go.
The Bride Wore Black Leather is about a hundred pages longer than the usual 200-page NIGHTSIDEbooks, but again, the first hundred pages are an independent story. I thought of it as a bonus: a novel and a novella in one package. Later in the book, I thought a couple of plot events, such as the events in Ward 12A in the Hospice, were disconnected from the original story — unless the Sun King caused the event, which it appears he did not. I have one other small complaint about this book, and that is that Green drags in too many references to another series of his, the Secret History. This felt a bit self-serving, but it probably annoyed me because I am invested in Taylor and Suzie. Even with these nagging disappointments, the book gets three-and-a-half stars for staying true to the premise of Nightside right to the end.
The Bride Wore Black Leather has everything I expect from a NIGHTSIDE book. Taylor is the Sam Spade for the twenty-first century, willing to stare down an angel, a demon or a god. Nightside has the meanest of the mean streets, and John Taylor is right at home there. Sunnyside? Not bloody likely. —Marion Deeds
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Drinking Midnight Wine
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