"The Crow: Clash by Night"
(Harper Prism, Paperback, 1998, read: Januar 2000)
"A crazed militia has planted a bomb in a day-care center, and a dedicated teacher discovers it just in time to get herself and the children to safety. Almost. For we are in the dark universe of the Crow, where the innocent must die so that justice can triumph. Where a woman devoted to peace must don camouflage as she prowls with her black-winged familiar through the tangled underworld of hate on a search-and-destroy mission that leads her from gun shows to the rubble of the disaster. A rubble that is stirring with new and hideous life ..."
The novel is based on the comic book 'The Crow' by James O'Barr. The original version (and the resulting movie with Brandon Lee) was about innocent people dying and coming back with the help of a crow to take revenge. 'Clash by Night' works with the same storyline. The innocent victim in this book is Amy Carlisle who gets killed together with another teacher and 10 little children in the bombing of a day-care-center. Initially the bomb was directed at a politician who should have been in the building. The death of the children was a pityful side effect. Six months after the bombing Amy returns to take revenge.
Besides the crow and the revenge of the victim there are other parallells to the original story: the policeman, whose help is needed after all in the end; the connection between the life of the crow and Amy's invincibility; single events which are quite similar. But there's an interesting difference: Amy realizes that's it's difficult not to become a 'monster' herself while dealing with 'monsters'.
Fans of the comic book and the movie will like this book, too. It's not especially pretentious literature, but entertaining and thrilling. Out of my own experience I can recommend it for long flights or train rides because in spite of its predictability it's never boring. After all it contains all the elements of the original story which made it so fascinating and made the movie into such an success.
[Dorothée Büttgen, January 00]
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