Way uptown in another world

by Shane Stevens

Elusive second book by Stevens, a long prowl down the tortured alleys of the American Nightmare. "No names have been changed to protect the innocent. They're as guilty as the guilty."

302 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Aka J.W. Rider
was an American author of crime novels. He was born in New York, New York to John and Caroline (Royale) Stevens. His novels include Go Down Dead (1966), Way Uptown in Another World (1971), Dead City (1973), Rat Pack (1974), By Reason of Insanity (1979), and The Anvil Chorus (1985). Stephen King has claimed to being a huge fan, and gave tribute to him in his book "The Dark Half", which features violent crime novels starring a character named 'Alexis Machine,' a reference to a character of the same name from the novel "Dead City." Appropriately Stevens was an intensely private person who avoided the limelight during his lifetime and has left many questions unanswered with his death.

Reviews

[Chad Eagleton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shane Stevens' fans familiar only with Dead City and By Reason of Insanity may not like Way Uptown In Another World. It's the least "crime" of his eight novels. Fans of plot-driven fiction will certainly hate it. Marcus Garvey Black's story isn't divided into three neat acts with a slam-bang ending. A man's life is never that neat, and it's never that clear.

For me, however, none of those are drawbacks. In my opinion, despite the praise heaped on Dead City by everyone from Stephen King to Dave Zeltserman and By Reason's importance in the creation of the serial killer novel, Way Uptown In Another World is clearly Shane Stevens' masterwork.

With his second novel set in Harlem, Stevens finds his street voice. Unlike Go Down Dead with it's pages of dense and sometimes hard to follow ghetto-speak, Uptown is both simple and starkly poetic, authentic but approachable. In this sometimes messy, but always beautiful novel, Stevens explores all those those themes that would come to dominate his later and more well-known works: the dark side of the American Dream and its false promise of opportunity, money and class as the true division between peoples, sadness and loss, and, finally, the thing that drew me to Stevens' work in the first place. Crime fiction is all too often dominated by squalor porn and a certain sadistic glee in aberrant and illegal behaviour. Shane's work, his reoccurring themes, confront those things in the world that separate and divide us unnecessarily. When he writes about criminals, mobsters, serial killers, French detectives, or New Jersey private eyes, it's not to show us how awful the world is. It's to teach us that it doesn't have to be that way.

Stevens needs to be rediscovered. His work needs to be reprinted. And no novel is more deserving than Way Uptown In Another world

[patty · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Chester Himes called Stevens the 'Greatest black novelist in Harlem.' The only problem is that Stevens is white. People were startled that a white man could capture the voice of black youth so accurately, that a white man could know--at least so it seemed--the indignant rage of African Americans in 1960s America so intimately. It made the book even more powerful since it was apparent that it wasn't just black people writing about race issues; other people had noticed and had a problem with it, too." A powerful novel.

[Donald · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like this book started strong, starting with the main character's life in Mississippi and the struggles he and his family faced being black at that place in that time. And I think it still was a good read when they moved on to Carolina and then New York. But I felt like the book started slipping when Marcus visited Florida, and it never did recover. Lots of good stuff about race relations, black vs. white in Harlem, the role of the po-lice and some of the ideas some African American groups had the time. It just wasn't a good "story" to read. Interesting, but not entertaining.