Deadstock [Mass Market Paperback]

Jeffrey Thomas' Punktown is one of my favorite worlds to visit. It's a place that's so far-flung into the future and yet it reflects a lot about modern society and culture. Punktown is a mirror for ourselves, showing us that the more things change, the more they stay the same. War, poverty, corruption, love, business, family, and struggle all exist in Punktown the same way they exist right here and right now. In Deadstock, Thomas tells two stories. One is a hard-boiled detective mystery featuring Jeremy Stake, a soldier-turned-sleuth who has a mutation that makes his face mimic any other face he looks at. The other half shows two street gangs trapped together in a seemingly abandoned building, trying to survive against a futuristic security system gone amok.

While mysteries are unfolding, Jeffrey Thomas makes sure that we see all of his characters from all sides. They're not just good or bad people. Everyone is after something and has their personal demons to deal with. Thomas is usually good about showing us both sides of every story. While his setting is the weird and hyper-futuristic Punktown, his characters stay true to basic human nature. While some of these people may be clones, mutants, aliens, or even a demon-god going through an apocalyptic metamorphosis, these are people with regular thoughts, feelings, and motivations. I feel like I didn't get to see enough of Punktown or its unique culture, but that's because Thomas puts a lot of time towards fleshing out these characters.

Similar to "Everybody Scream!", Deadstock has a large cast, and not everyone makes it out alive. But while "Everybody Scream" was more cohesive, held together by the strange carnival setting, Deadstock feels less focused. I feel like the two main plots were really great ideas for short novels that were put together to form a full-length novel. They strike different tones. As soon as I started grooving on the hard-boiled detective stuff, the chapter ends and I'm thrown into the survival-horror genre. And vice versa. Plus, those two plots eventually converge. As the demon-god called Dai-oo-ika constantly evolves throughout the story, Stake's missing toy case and the survival of a dozen gangsters suddenly lose weight.

"Everybody Scream!" remains my favorite Jeffrey Thomas book, along with several of his short stories, but Deadstock is still a really good read. Punktown is always a fascinating place, and Deadstock treads new territory as hard sci fi with a soul.

It is difficult to know where to begin when trying to describe just how much there is to enjoy in Jeffrey Thomas' Deadstock, a novel set in his Punktown universe which I am just now discovering. The world-building is superb, on a level one finds with writers like Samuel Delaney, William Gibson and China Mieville. The sprawling metropolis of Paxton - called Punktown by its inhabitants - on the colony world of Oasis, has texture and depth and history; you feel it emerging around you as you read in passages like this one:

"Beneath Punktown there was, in effect, a shadow version of itself. When they'd run out of room to build sideways or upwards, city planners had looked downwards instead. This underground district had come to be known as Subtown. Its borders were not nearly as extensive as those of the city proper overhead, but it still encompassed a sizeable area.
--The rays of the sun did not reach down here; its citizens, many of whom might not venture aboveground for months at a time, lived and worked under the artificial glow of lamps set into a concrete sky. As evening fell, some of these lamps dimmed and others were shut off completely, to give something of the effect of night (though Subtown was not made so dark as to give criminals undue cover for their activities). Because of the limits set by the ceiling, buildings were smaller, tending towards flat-roofed tenement structures, often with shops on the ground floor. There were factories and warehouses too, but these had not been safe in their subterranean shelter when financial plagues had swept through the city and manufacturers had migrated in flocks to the Outback Colony or even to overcrowded and much-blighted Earth in a reverse colonization. Wherever labor was cheaper, or perhaps restrictions were laxer about how many living workers companies were required to employ to balance out their automatic laborers whom they didn't have to pay at all."

And like the world, the characters Thomas creates - Jeremy Stake, the face-changing war veteran turned private investigator; John Fukuda, the rich industrialist who hires him to find his daughter's stolen doll; Javier Dias, the leader of the Folger Street Snarlers whose collective fate becomes tangled up in the events that unfold; Thi Gohn, the blue-skinned Ha Jiin 'Earth Killer' - all have texture, depth and history. There are no black and whites here, no simplistic good-guys bad-guys, only shadings of grey where all too flawed - and thus wholly believable - individuals have to deal with their lives, their memories and the consequences of their actions. You really come to care about the characters you meet here, which really raises the stakes in the best way possible.

And I have to mention the Ouija phones. There are a lot of neat concepts and touches that are part of the world of Punktown - deadstock, bioengineered kawaii dolls, Punktown fashion fads, the Blank People, belfs, Decimators - but the Ouija phones are among the coolest, more original ideas I've ever come across. All of its other merits aside, Deadstock is worth reading for the Ouija phones alone.

All in all this was a fast-paced, tightly plotted, and highly enjoyable read that left me wanting more, more of this Punktown universe and of the characters who inhabit it. Highly recommended.

Probably his best work; also the first of his I read. I was expecting a simple hard-boiled sci-fi detective thing, it's chock-full of fascinating characters and original ideas, Jeremy Stake being the prime example of both.

Stake is hired by a billionaire to find his daughter's one-of-a-kind doll, thought to be stolen. Meanswhile, a street gang goes looking for a missing member, and winds up under siege from... something bad. The romance that goes on during the course of this is very engaging; starcrossed and all that. We also get flashbacks about Stake's time in the Blue War, where he meets the hot alien chick he can't stop thinking about. What makes it memorable, in the end, is that she can't stop thinking about him, either.

What else can I say? It's got all the good stuff.

PS: Not for the squeamish.