Dead Things [Paperback]

for an amazingly well written and constructed book it is a surprise that not many people actually know about it. it seems hard to understand the first time round but by the second read you get a hang of the language that richard calder uses. the specific flash backs that dagon has, show us a vast variety of worlds and time periods that are slowly built together for the finale, all in all it is an amazing, wonderful... utterly alien book that assults the senses and sometimes the dignity.

Richard Calder's Dead Things is a masterpiece of modern decadence. Though it may not have as many startlingly imaginative turns as the first two entries in the trilogy,it is a bombastic ouruborous that brings home the work's import for the culture. It has images that may "disgust" some but it shouls be understood that when discussing questions of decadence one must use the language and images of decadence. Calder points out, inan engaging and titillating way, that our culture's reliance on information and technology is moving us into one of those cycles of decadence.

Warning: Contains spoilers

These three novels (Dead Girls, Dead Boys, and Dead Things) can be viewed in two ways: as a traditional trilogy, chronicling the adventures of its protagonist in a reality gone mad, or as complementary narratives which, using the same premise as a springboard, veer off in wildly different directions. Either way, these novels, ambitious as they may be, constitute three moderately successful pieces of fiction which do not comprise a satisfying whole.

Dead Girls, the first book in the cycle, lays the groundwork for the rest of the series. The book focuses on Ignatz Kwazh, an angst ridden, obsessive nebbish, and his exotic paramour Primavera. Upon entering puberty, Primavera, like many of her contemporaries, contracted a nanotech virus which transformed her into a white, plastic skinned lifeform, called a "Doll" or "Lilim" (after Adam's first wife Lilith) by a fearful human populace. Males are apparently immune to the virus, but can become carriers through contact with the sexually ravenous Lilim--their saliva carries agents that infect male gametes, insuring that any girl-children will be born dolls.

The lovers, fugitives from a quarantined Britain, live in Bangkok, where Primavera earns a living as an assassin. Having crossed Madame Kito, the kingpin of Bangkok's underworld, the couple are hunted by her minions and by allied American intelligence agents. The duo eludes their pursuers, but Primavera is wounded, and dies at novel's end.

Dead Boys begins with Ignatz mourning the loss of Primavera. He aimlessly wanders the streets of Bangkok, carrying Primavera's excised sex organs in a jar, occasionally chewing them for the high they provide. Ignatz's tenuous grip on reality is further loosened when he begins to receive messages from 1000 years in the future, from a Lilim named Vanity who claims to be his daughter. Vanity is being hunted by Lord Dagon, who may actually be Ignatz himself. Dead Boys also introduces the concept of Meta, the name for the virus behind the doll plague. The virus, which has moved into the male population (transforming its victims into fanged, sexless creatures called Elohim), is now affecting the very fabric of reality.

Dead Things, the last book in the series, follows Lord Dagon, a ruthless doll killer who roams the solar system in search of his prey. Here, Calder reveals that Dagon is indeed a future incarnation of Ignatz, transformed into Elohim by the Meta virus. Discovering that he is the key to ending the Meta plague, Dagon/Ignatz travels back in time to prevent the Meta virus from infecting reality and changing the course of human history.

The series' strongest features are Calder's dystopian vision and his frenetic prose. In Calder's decadent future, anything goes. Technology, in an attempt to cater to an amoral populace, has run amok, threatening humanity's existence. Calder conveys the desperation in feverish prose, effectively portraying a world where hope has vanished and violence and perversity reign.

The book's strengths, oddly enough, are also it weaknesses. There's just too much going on, and Calder's stream of consciousness riffs don't help. The books' influences are colorful and plentiful, ranging from literary sources as diverse as Neuromancer, Peter Pan, Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, Dracula, and Frankenstein, to films like Metropolis and Logan's Run. The problem is Calder is nodding in too many directions, as if eager to impress readers with his cleverness. The avalanche of words and information is downright numbing at times. Calder, indeed, tacitly acknowledges this, occasionally slowing the narrative to provide some needed exposition, the lion's share of which, unfortunately, appears near the end of Dead Things. It seems Calder, approaching the conclusion of his magnum opus, suddenly realized that he needed to explain it to readers.

Of course, one might expect this kind of confusion in a treatise on the malleability of reality, but Calder wants to be all things to all people. Thus, the books can be characterized as cyber AND splatterpunk, science fiction AND horror. They can also be interpreted as diatribes against the objectification of women or as misogynistic pieces of dreck. It's not clear where Calder stands. Knowing he lived in Thailand for most of the 1990s explains some of the content of the books, but not the author's thrust--Calder's moral stance is unclear.

In the end, the books are unclassifiable. Even the publisher, St. Martin's, can't provide insight. Consider this paragraph from the press release for Dead Things:

"Hailed as one of the most audacious and exciting new voices in science fiction, Richard Calder offers a fast moving, exotic, erotic and violently modern tour of the wild side of the future, a surreal trip that claws its way toward love."

This statement is somewhat accurate until it reaches the "surreal trip clawing its way toward love" part--does anyone know what that means? What the press release fails to mention is that the narrative is often confusing and erratic, and that Calder, in trying to dazzle his readers, instead pushes them towards sensory overload. Hopefully, Calder will take the positive elements demonstrated in these works and put them to good use in future works.