Horror Review: City of the Dead (1976, Herbert Lieberman)

I've never had an interest in visiting New York. I've never wanted to live there, never wanted to vacation there, never thought about just stopping in to see the sights. I have friends who live there and enjoy it. It's a publishing mecca. They say, "If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere." It's nothing personal -- the place has never done me wrong -- it's just one of a million or so places on the planet I've never been all that interested in physically visiting.

That said, the idea of New York is fascinating. If the United States is meant to be a cultural melting pot, then New York is what's generating all the heat. You can't just stuff several million people representing a thousand different cultures, nationalities, ethnicities, religions, means, and lifestyles into an area of roughly 55,000 square miles and not create a massive sociological experiment. That side of New York is intriguing: not just the upper-class glitz and glamour of Park Avenue, but the myriad of middle- and lower-class areas too. Rich people are generally uninteresting to read about in fiction for me: give me the tired, the poor, and the down-trodden any day of the week. That's what Herbert Lieberman delivers in City of the Dead, and I was hooked on page one.

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If I had to sum City of the Dead up in a single sentence, it would be, "A grime-covered, bloodstained love letter to the real 1970's New York." I could do research, I could watch all manner of travel vlogs, I could browse pictures on Instagram until my eyes fell out of my skull, but no matter how hard I tried, no matter how good a writer I think I am, I could never in a million years convince anyone I knew what the hell I was talking about when it comes to New York. Lieberman, on the other hand, does so with the effortless verve and panache of someone who walked the streets, breathed the air, and knew the people. He may live in California now, but make no mistake, this guy was New York born and New York bred. Outsiders like me could scratch the surface, but like his protagonist Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Paul Konig wouldn't think of conducting an autopsy without digging into the guts, the brains, the vital areas, Lieberman doesn't stoop to imprint his New York on the page in such a superficial fashion.

Lieberman's New York is the uncovered underbelly of a world that doesn't care because it can't possibly slow down enough for such trivial necessities. This New York of 1974 is a remorseless factory of humanity, where everyone's on an assembly line. Stopping to care, taking your eye off the conveyor belt for just a few seconds, is a mistake that could cost you a finger if you're lucky. If fortune fails to favor you, you'll get ground between the gears: everything will stop for the few minutes it takes to drag what's left of you out of the machine, and then it's back to business as usual. There's always someone else waiting to step in and fill your vacancy.

It is difficult for me to remember the last time I felt so fully, grotesquely, and completely immersed in this aspect of a big city courtesy of the printed word. City of the Dead is set just a few scant years before I was born. It's a setting in a city captured on film with the likes of The Warriors, Taxi Driver, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. The alleys of Death Wish, the streets of The French Connection, the days of Marathon Man, and the nights of The Bad Lieutenant: New York of the 70's is indelibly imprinted in our pop cultural conscience courtesy of our cinema. City of the Dead is all of this and more reduced to the simplicity and complexity of twenty-six letters, rearranged in thousands of possibly combinations, representing words communicating thoughts from Lieberman's brain into ours. New York in this book is the main character -- she is the face set against the skyline on the cover, the one where everything and nothing registers in her unsettling gaze, the one where a casual glance is insufficient to determine if her eyes are open or closed.

Hell, I've been staring at the artwork for several minutes now trying to decide for myself. Like those images that reveal a vase or a pair of faces, a young woman or an aged crone, depending on where you're looking, this haunting cover gracing this haunting story refuses to give up its secrets. It demands we process both perspectives simultaneously, all the while secure in the knowledge our brains don't run in parallel like that. The closest I've ever seen to an author capturing the authenticity, danger, and disturbing beauty of a city the way Lieberman captures New York is Natsuo Kirino's treatment of Tokyo in her incredible noir thriller, Out.

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I'm 800 words into the review. So far I've mentioned a main character in passing, praised Lieberman's authenticity of setting, and said nothing at all about the plot. Maybe I should get with the goods, eh?

City of the Dead has several threads running through it, but they all intersect with Paul Konig. As mentioned, Dr. Konig is New York's Chief Medical Examiner. It's a position he's held for forty years, watching administrations come and go, while he and his fellow civil servants perform the grim duties of determining both identity and cause of death for the dozens of unfortunate individuals that pass into their chambers via stainless steel carts and body bags every day. Konig, now in his mid-sixties and no longer a spring chicken, knows his time as CME is coming towards an end. Other doctors, some more ambitious and motivated than others, smell the blood in the water, and every mistake Paul makes is one more check mark in his retirement column. Fortunately, Konig is a brilliant pathologist: very little escapes his gaze under the harsh lights and sharp scalpels of the autopsy theater.

Unfortunately, while Konig is second-to-none in his chosen field, he's far from perfect anywhere else. His obsessive dedication to his craft and profession have devastated his life outside of work. Before being widowed, he'd pushed his wife to the breaking point. With her passing, his daughter Lauren emptied her bank account and vanished into the cold and unforgiving world of the New York streets. Now, fully aware of how alone he truly is, struggling to maintain the breakneck pace New York requires of those who call themselves civil servants, working with both the police and the FBI to find his daughter before she winds up in one of his freezers, Konig finds himself working on one of the worst cases of his career.

NYPD has uncovered the dismembered remains of at least two bodies, possibly more, dumped into the East River. Heads, hands, feet, and much of the flesh missing, this is hardly your run-of-the-mill homicide. Whoever did this has left no calling card, no evidence. Unless the CME's office can provide identification and cause of death, there's no way to identify motive, and without motive there's no way to anticipate when or how the killer will strike again. It's just one case among hundreds. Konig could pass it off to any of the other pathologists in the building, but doing so would be admitting to himself that he's not got what it takes to hack it at the job any longer. No matter what what the world throws at him in terms of familial danger, office in-fighting, or sensational stories spread across the front pages of the Times about incompetence and corruption within the Chief Medical Examiner's office, Dr. Konig will make sense of these senseless killings, assemble the pieces of the gruesome jigsaw one by one, and help the police bring the killer to justice. Even if it kills him.

How much pressure, how much piling on, can one New York pathologist take? Dr. Konig's going to find out, and we the readers will learn just where our own breaking points are along the way.

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City of the Dead puts the screws to both its main character and its readers from the very first page, where we're introduced to Konig in media res, inspecting a trio of crime scenes where the painful tragedy of humanity has played out savagely upon the walls, floors, and ceilings of the victims' world. It's a world a grim and determined reader will not be leaving for a further 355 pages. Christopher Lehman-Haupt's blurb on the cover about becoming literally afraid to turn the pages is a bit melodramatic, but I can totally see where he's coming from. City of the Dead holds nothing back. The victims seen by the CME come in all ages, all genders, all backrounds: junkies who overdose on their supply; prostitutes who pick up the wrong john; children battered and finally broken by their own parents. The matter-of-fact-ness of it all is just one more tragedy heaped upon the shoulders of characters tasked with holding back a tsunami while armed with a few buckets and shot glasses.

It's depressing, but it's depressing in its authenticity, a non-fictional piece of fiction, a eulogy to those both devoured by the city and those who soon will be, for New York like all big cities subsists on a steady diet of its own offspring. City of the Dead wallows in its depictions of the worst things humanity has to offer. By focusing on this with such laser-like intensity, Lieberman in a strange way helps the reader appreciate the best things. After all, if you have the luxury of reading this book instead of laying on a slab in the temperature-controlled basement of a government pathology building, if you can close the covers and still walk upright, you won today's life lottery. Enjoy that next breath--you emerged, unscathed but not unaffected, from a vicious vision of beauty at its most diseased.

Kathy Reichs, Jefferson Bass, and Patricia Cornwell might have brought the forensic thriller to the masses, but their stories, despite tackling dark premises, pop back out into the light of day once the book's concluded. City of the Dead is different. Though the New York Lieberman documents is a world now buried under four decades' of time's relentless passage, one can't travel there without bringing some of it home. This is an unforgettable story; the fact Herbert Lieberman isn't a household name in 2018 is one of the worst crimes perpetrated on literature today.

Five unseeing (yet never sleeping) eyes out of five.