Black City

Matthew Dear's Black City can't be found on any map. It's a composite, an imaginary metropolis peopled by desperate cases, lovelorn souls, and amoral motives. Like most literary gothams, Black City is a place to love and hate, as seedy and seductive as a nightclub's back room. Matthew Dear, the musician, may live in New York City, but the Matthew Dear of Black City inhabits a sound-world unlike any other: a monument to the shadowy side of urban life that bumps and creaks, shudders and wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. Black City is Matthew Dear's darkest and most engrossing work to date. Now is Matthew Dear's moment, and it sounds like nothing else.