Eric Garcia is, as his own acknowledgements makes clear, a strange dude, a writer whose imagination runs riot. I loved his Matchstick Men (made into a wonderful film starring Nicholas Cage in one of his better performances) and his dinosaur detective series. The Repossession Mambo is not quite as outlandish as a PI who stuffs his dinosaur tail down his pants, but it’s still based on a great idea. The novel, marketed as some kind of thriller, is in fact a take on a standard science fiction concept, that of widespread organ replacement some time in the near future. The book’s anonymous hero is a Bio-Repo Man, whose job is to repossess artificial organs when their owners default on the loans they inevitably take to buy the organs (which are horrendously expensive). If you don’t keep up your repayments, our hero comes along and rips the organ out. Usually you die there on the spot.
Garcia writes up a storm, a seesawing stream of consciousness that retells his life before and after the becoming a Bio-Repo Man, including life as a fugitive in the here and now, hiding from the Credit Union he used to be the star Repo Man for. The style is manic and true, and I really enjoyed the character. The plot setup produces endless scenes of black humour, which I also enjoyed. Imagining a world of metal organs and global credit unions funding them is a tough ask for any author, and Garcia gets that right also.
But two aspects of The Repossession Mambo undermined my enjoyment. The hero’s life story, in particular a stint in the army, is dull. And the overarching hide and seek plot employs a resolution that made me groan. Clever idea, great style but a plot weak on character development . . . overall, an enjoyable but humdrum sci-fi thriller.