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Borderline the story: 2 out of 5

Borderline the book: 3 out of 5

Bringing together some late 50s / early 60s tales of Block’s, with the bulk of the 240ish page set taken up by the titular story, which is… trashy. This is a cross-section of the grodiest of pulp impulses (namely violence against women) and Block’s erotica, weakly mapped to a thriller. As a fan of Block’s, I’d say you can see moments where he’s trying to push the narrative to include more compelling writing – certain character-based scenes work well, he definitely writes the kinky stuff well, and he brings as much poeticism to the violence as the subject matter can allow – but it’s problematically just a non-story, mostly just chronicling various obsessions through characters who aren’t allowed much page space to be explored. Marty’s gambling world view is interesting; Meg’s just-divorced point of view and Lily’s do-anything-to-survive blase approach are both rather progressive in their own ways; and even Weaver’s descent into okaying his behaviors is intriguing; but these are all just the bits Block could stuff into the story’s fringes, which otherwise swirls these characters together uninterestingly to provide the most skin and blood as possible: Marty meets Meg and they go for a hedonistic spin; they happen upon the strip club where Lily is trying to do the math to make a buck and get out of town; and Lily stays at the hotel where serial killer Weaver is plotting how to get to the next girl he’s going to slice up. There’s no real plot driving us to follow along with these people, just the naughtiness of peeking into their sex and deviances, leading to a pointlessly nihilistic ending, just to drive the pointlessness of the whole thing home. I appreciate Hard Case digging up Block’s stuff for us to read, but this really does come across as work-for-hire that had to meet a certain tonal mandate.

Backing up the book are three other shorts, two of which (The Burning Fury; Fire at Night) are very lightweight and match Borderline’s “theme,” such as it is – meaning they’re pretty cheap and lurid – but at least the third one, Stag Party Girl, almost makes the whole set worth it. It takes up a fair amount of pages itself (60) – and has some absolutely cracking dialogue, as we follow a PI’s investigation into what he believes is the wrongful condemnation of his client, made more problematic by the client essentially having hired him to prevent the crime that ended up happening from occurring. The setup is a bit forced, but Block deftly writes around it, and makes the procedural bits incredibly rewarding. This story is great, but… it’s also not linked at all to what came before. That’s fine, of course, but if we wanted to consider the book as a set of stories of a certain type, it doesn’t belong.