"When myth incarnates in the waking world...”
Sergei Lukyanenko
Night Watch: The Gothic Noir of Sergei Lukyanenko
by C. S. Thompson
Sergei Lukyanenko’s Night Watch series is an example of a sub-genre I call “gothic noir.” Gothic noir combines the imagery of film noir- its gritty realism, its down-on-their-luck characters, moral ambiguity, and sense of fatalism- with the supernatural themes and concepts of horror fiction. As the result naturally involves placing the mythic in a modern and streetwise context, pretty much any gothic noir would also be mythorealist by default:
The world of noir is already a horrifying place- people are accused of crimes they didn’t commit, but then again they can’t be sure they’re really innocent; the past is an inescapable force that makes choices irrelevant and true freedom impossible; no statement can be taken at face value and love leads almost inevitably to betrayal. In such a world there is no escape and little chance of survival… Some writers and filmmakers have taken this concept further, introducing elements of supernatural horror to noir’s grimly romantic world, or placing archetypal noir characters in a horror setting… This borderland dates back to the beginning of the noir style… Despite this history of overlap between the styles, this borderland has only just begun to be explored. Noir’s no-escape mindset would seem to be an ideal match for the darkness of horror fiction. There’s a lot more exploration to be done. (From the article “Gothic Noir” on the Noir Originals website)
At the time that I wrote these words for Noir Originals, I didn’t feel that most of the available work in this sub-genre had lived up to its potential. A great deal more gothic noir has been published since then under the label of “urban fantasy,” and most of it has been conspicuously unimaginative- “Sam Spade vs. Dracula” would about sum it up, with a number of equally dull variations such as a private eye who happens to be a werewolf or a witch or an escapee from Hell.
But then there is Night Watch....
You can read the entire article here, when you visit C.S. Thompson's blog, Night Wandering: Myth, Magic and Religion.