Customer Reviews

Deadstock (Punktown)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

Deadstock is a wonderful sci-fi story of mystery and mythos set in Punktown. Punktown is a dark place where aliens and humans, as well as interdimensional beings and worlds all come together. And Jeremy Stake, a detective with special gifts brings this story all together. This book is a real page turner and consumed me to the point that some touching parts brought me to tears. Punktown is a wonderful world that is uniquely Thomas and well worth investigating if you have never had the pleasure of entering this world before. You'll be hooked. I highly recommend this book.

Punktown is a crime-filled metropolis on the colony world, Oasis. Jeremy Stake is a (mutant) private detective with chameleon-like abilities. If Stake looks too long at a person's face, his own face becomes a mirror image. Something Stake hates more than anyone could possibly know or understand. Stake's current assignment is to locate the missing, one-of-a-kind, living doll of teen Yuki Fukuda.

Yuki's doll is called Dai-oo-ika and had been created by her father, John Fukuda, owner of Fukuda Bioforms. The company not only creates limited editions of living dolls, but also grows battery animals as a food source. (Battery animals are rapidly grown by the thousands in great tanks of nutrient solution, minus heads, feathers, and other unneeded parts.) Yuki's doll had been stolen out of her locker while she attended class. The only person Yuki feels could possibly hate her enough to consider doing this is Krimson Tableau, the daughter of a business rival. No one knows where Krimson disappeared to on the day Dai-oo-ika went missing. Some say that Krimson had run off with her older boyfriend, Brat. However, Brat has also disappeared.

The Folger Street Snarlers, Brat's gang currently lead by a man named Javier, goes searching for their missing brother near the apartments of Steward Gardens. The apartments had been created on the prime land location of Beaumonde. Yet, the apartments had never opened for business and still sit empty. Upon entering the building, the Snarlers, learn that a mutant gang called the Tin Town Terata are already within it. Worse, the Tin Town Teratas have been trapped there for over ten days by some bio-engineered humans without faces. These faceless humans are referred to as "Blank People". And the Snarlers begin sharing the Teratas gang's fate. The gangs must team up to find a way to escape. Unable to call for out for help, the Blank People are slowly killing off the gang members.

Meanwhile, Dai-oo-ika pines away for his young mother as he struggles to survive and understand what is happening to him. Dai-oo-ika begins growing in size, intelligence, and resentment toward others. The doll will soon become a danger to all living beings.

**** Fans of the classic cult movie "Blade Runner" will absolutely LOVE this novel. The author, Jeffrey Thomas, has added several items and flash backs (Stake's) that do not truly matter to the plot and/or story line, except for a small reference near the end; however, I found them to be extremely creative and never got bored. If P.I. Jeremy Stake has a future assignment published, I hope to be first in line to read it. I believe Jeffrey Thomas possesses a riveting imagination and I am hoping for more on this mutant character. ****

Reviewed by Detra Fitch of Huntress Reviews.

Deadstock's title is the first hint that the sci-fi noir universe of Punktown is an unsettling one. The nightmarish possibility of headless, limbless vat-grown meat clones has become a reality, a thriving industry that's as lucrative as it is cutthroat. A petty feud between the offspring of John Fukuda of Fukuda Bioforms and Adrian Tableau of Tableau Meats transforms into a full-blown war, with the shapeshifting Jeremy Stake at its center.

Stake is a gumshoe in the traditional noir mold, complete with porkpie hat. He is also a mutant who unconsciously transforms to resemble the person of whomever he's focusing on. This considerable talent is put to good use in tracking down the lost bioengineered doll of Fukuda's daughter, Yuki. Stake's history as a war veteran haunts him with every step, including a woman from another dimension he still pines for.

In what at first seems like a separate narrative, Javier is a gang leader of the Folger Street Snarlers who at 25 years old is past his prime. He comes to Steward Gardens to look for a missing gang member and friend, Brat. The Snarlers eventually becomes trapped, along with a rival mutant gang, in a technological house of horrors.

On the surface, this is a noir thriller complete with faceless monsters, ray guns, and aliens. But peel back a layer and author Jeffrey Thomas has so much more to offer. There's an overarching theme here about the capacity for someone to love while at the same time recognizing that dependence on another necessarily means a dilution of self. Stake struggles with all his relationships, unsure of everything about himself except for his love of a prisoner from a long forgotten war. Fathers struggle with their daughters' independence, bioforms struggle with separation anxiety from their owners, and even weary gang leaders find love in surprising places. Through it all, each character is challenged as to who they really are - and if the sacrifices they made for love were ultimately worth it.

Thomas deftly balances the weird setting of Punktown with the basest human emotions: of love, jealousy, and violent rage. Deadstock is perhaps best summed up by a brilliant invention that still creeps me out just thinking about it: Ouija phones. These phones just might tap into the wavelengths of the dead, who can barely communicate anything but a sense of urgency and loss. Deadstock begins and ends with these phones. In the end, the only thing we have left of a person's passing is the love we felt reflected back at us. Thomas leaves his characters, and the reader, haunted. And that's a good thing.

Deadstock is the latest offering in Jeffrey Thomas' Punktown saga. Mr. Thomas is pretty well known to most fans of horror and outré fiction for his stories set in the city Paxton on the planet Oasis, and for his interest in HPL's mythos. He is on the verge of making it to the big time. Previously his work has been released as short stories in genre magazines, then compiled in anthologies or single author collections, or as novels published by various small presses. As I understand it, Deadstock was a direct release to mass Markey paperback, a first for Mr. Thomas, and a signal that his backers think he can generate a significant audience.

Deadstock is published by Solaris, an imprint of BL Publishing in the UK. It costs $7.99, much less expensive than the typical small press fare and no doubt indicative of hopes for high sales. The evocative cover art is by Darius Hinks and, I think, superbly captures the futuristic feel of Punktown and the mutability of the main character in the novel. Page count is 414, although the text itself starts on page 9. All in all, good value for the money.

I think it is difficult for a novice reader to come into this story and fully appreciate it. Although Mr. Thomas tries to place everything into context, you need an appreciation of much of his previous output. First of all, you need to be familiar with Punktown itself, from the various short story collections (Punktown, Punktown: Shades of Gray and Punktown: Third Eye) to really have a sense of how gritty, crime ridden and tense the setting is. It would also be helpful to have already met the various human and humanoid races who inhabit this world, like the wide-mouthed Choom native to Oasis, the blue turbaned, gray skinned Kalians, the tentacle eyed Tikkihotto, etc. The reader also needs to be conversant with the fiction of Lovecraft. Mr. Thomas is a noted mythos author. Most of his stories are in the collection Unholy Dimensions from Mythos Books, which I highly recommend. More recently the author has attempted to blend his love of the mythos with Punktown. It's nothing new for him; you can read his series of short stories about the Old Ones in Unholy Dimensions. This new books is a direct descendent of Monstrocity published in hardcover by Prime Books in 2003, although it is not per se a sequel. There is no overlap of characters but the events and locations of Monstrocity are fresh in Punktown's recent past. The Great Old Ones of Lovecraft and Derleth are not solely or primarily concerned with Earth and humans, and are not constrained by time and spatial dimensions like we are. They can manifest to nonhuman races. If they lost a war with the Elder Gods (Nodens et al) and they are trying to regain primacy in this dimension, then they will manipulate whoever they must to open the interdimensional gates that will allow this to happen. So it should be unsurprising that the races that share Oasis have some myths, legends and horrific truths in common. Cthulhu and its ilk are the Outer Gods to the Kalians. In the future, no one raises cattle or chickens any more; they grow "living" lumps of chicken or beef flesh. Well, in Monstrocity, one of the growers of these foodstuffs is using the technology to raise monstrous creatures, spawn of the Outer Gods, to allow them to penetrate our sphere. Monstrocity deals with the discovery and confrontation of the cult doing these unspeakable things. That finally brings us back to Deadstock, set some time in the aftermath of Monstrocity.

************* Spoilers may follow, stop reading now if that bothers you.**********

Deadstock presents two stories that intertwine but never really mesh. Jeremy Stake, a veteran of the transdimensional Blue War, is a private eye. He is also a mutant whose features will mimic those of the person he is looking at, giving him characteristics a bit like a chameleon. He is hired by John Fukuda, a wealthy magnate of the artificial livestock industry (or deadstock, giving the novel its title) to retrieve a rare doll that was lost by or stolen from his daughter Yuki. These kawaii-dolls are all the range with Punktown teen girls. They are essentially artificial life forms. Yuki's doll, Dai-oo-ika, was the rarest, completely unique, and now it's gone missing. It turns out hers was vaguely anthropoid, with wings and claws, and feelers instead of a face. Sound familiar? Anyone who has read enough mythos fiction can catch a glimmering of where this is going. It also eventually comes out that it was fabricated with the same technology used for such ill purposes in Monstrocity. As Stake slowly unravels the whereabouts of Dai-oo-ika, he also begins to unravel some inconsistencies in the lives of Fukuda and his daughter. We learn more about his experiences in the Blue War, where he had experiences that would not be out of place in a novel about Vietnam and fell for a blue skinned sniper who could easily have been modeled after the enemy trigger woman in Full Metal Jacket. In parallel with this, an outcast Punktown mutant gang and a gang of tough street youths are trapped in an unoccupied building that was designed by Fukuda's brother. This apartment was to have nonhuman robotic servants for each apartment directed by an encephalon, an artificial brain, and they have now run seriously amuck. These disparate gangs are trapped together and try with increasing desperation to escape the merciless onslaught of these automatons. As Slake, Yuki and Fukuda are ultimately drawn to this building where the gangs are trapped, the two groups never meet or directly interact, even after the story reaches its climactic moment. What ties them together are how they are affected by the slow transformation of Dai-oo-ika, who is making its way to this apartment building also.

I never wrote a review of Monstrocity because I was not blown away by it. Unfortunately I am left with a similar impression of Deadstock. I really really like Jeffrey Thomas' short fiction, and my review of Unholy Dimensions shows how much I like his mythos stories. Unfortunately this novel fell a bit flat for me. None of the characters were really developed well; some of them came across as clichés. For example, I could have done without the whole interlude-in-flashback to the Blue War which read like a Vietnam knock off. I never got a good feel for why Stake fell so hard for an enemy combatant and I really disliked the Deus ex machine denouement of his relationship with her. After all the build up the plot seemed to fizzle out a bit, and I can't understand why the two plot threads were not more closely tied together to give the novel a greater sense of cohesion. I also was very put off by a shameless self plug in the middle of the book. Stake is trying to research the cult of the Outer Gods and on the web comes across two reference books. Oh, not the Necronomicon or Mysteries of the Worm, but rather Monstrocity and Everybody Scream. And the name of the bookstore where they were for sale was Shocklines. Of course, it is old hat for mythos authors to use the names of their friends and colleagues in a mythos story, but always as an inside joke for devoted fans. Maybe this was meant to be humorous? Sure didn't work for me!

So much for the bad. What was good? Well, Mr. Thomas has an accomplished hand at descriptive prose. The whole book was very readable and filled with interesting little asides and vignettes. He can also pencil a mean action sequence. The battle scenes were very exciting. He has the mythos in his blood; his descriptions of the development of Dai-oo-iki were nicely creepy and rang very true for the genre. Even though I didn't care for some broad brushstrokes of the plot, I liked the parts greater than the whole. In fact this book is a page turner that I read through in a couple of days. I never set it aside like I have been doing with Black Sutra. And, dang it, I just plain like everything about Punktown. I'm glad to have this book but I doubt I'll be rereading it soon. Maybe the mythos and Punktown work better for me in short stories than novels. I dunno. Your move.

Punktown is back, and I LOVE Punktown!

Private Investigator Jeremy Stake is a chameleon, a shifter, whose face changes outside of his control, usually into the face of the nearest person. Sometimes his genetic affliction helps his investigations, sometimes it hinders him. Stake has been hired by John Fukuda to find his daughter Yuki's Kawaii doll named Dai-oo-ika. Kawaii dolls are bio-engineered toys for wealthy, upscale young girls. These girls also use Ouija phones, cell phones that supposedly pick up the voices of the dead.

Some of the products produced from Fukuda Bioforms are called Deadstock, lumps of brainless and limbless meats along with other, more sinister forms of bioengineering. Stake is immediately suspicious of how far Fukuda would go to please his daughter with a special, one-of-a-kind Kawaii doll.

Three storylines coalesce into a single plot: Stake's assignment to find Dai-oo-ika, Stake's memories of the Blue Wars and a beautiful, blue-skinned transdimensional being named Thi, and the plight of a Subtown gang known as the Folger Street Snarlers. All roads leads to Steward Gardens, an abandoned, upscale apartment complex in the heart of Punktown's prosperous district, but as yet unopened and vacant. Something is alive in Steward Gardens.

Deadstock is a smoothly furious read through the depths of Punktown, focusing around the upper class areas of Quidd's Market and the classy Beaumonde district, with a few excursions into the seedier areas of Subtown. Some of the more interesting characters are the members of the mutant gang the Tin Town Terata, who team up with the Snarlers in a fight for their lives.

You'll find undertones of lovecraftian horrors, and some short but interesting references to Thomas's previous works, such as the black cathedral from Letters From Hades (not a Punktown novel but excellent), and to the Bedbugs from another of Thomas's Punktown masterpieces. You'll shudder at the mutants, feel the quixotic alien atmosphere of Punktown, and wallow in Thomas's illusory, imaginative world.

There are a couple of "surprises" that are easily guessed, but Thomas makes no overt attempt to hide them and they manage to flow just fine into the storyline as events unfold. Deadstock will keep you reading well into the night, so good you won't be able to put it down. Don't forget to pick up Thomas's other Punktown novels. Enjoy!

Jeffrey Thomas' Blue War is a fantastic and explosive novel that combines so many elements of genres, it almost deserves it's own section in your local bookstore. Set in the Punktown universe, Blue War tells the tale of Jeremy Stake, war veteran turned dective (who returns with a bang from Thomas' previous novel, Deadstock).

I read the novel Deadstock first, and though it is technically set afterwards - I find it unnecessary to have read Deadstock first. Though the worlds Thomas creates are very in depth and full of character driven stories, each novel seems to explain the world well enough that you can pick it right up and jump in. Without going over the top on the details at the same time.
Thomas has the ability to do what most writers only dream of doing. Write about characters we actually care about. In most pieces in his genre(s), characters are two dimensional beings - either simply to flawed to be believable, or to perfect to relate with. With Blue War, as all other of Thomas' works, I find the characters to be so driven with hardship and emotional baggage that I imagine them being old friends. Though it is out of this world and "futuristic" to say the least, I feel as though this could be happening right now. The language is smooth and textured with dialect that is still almost universal, and the individual histories of each character are so rich that each action they make, is easily reflected upon their last choices. It is unpredictable in the best sense of the word.

I found the balance of action and story to be quite fitting. The action kept me in suspense, while the continual character development and dialog kept me from being bored with a "Hollywood blockbuster" of a novel. It was a real page turner, and finished it personally in record time.

In conclusion - I know this was not my last visit to Punktown. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a intriguing read, rich in action, mystery, thrill and suspense. Not to mention your healthy dose of science fiction! Pick up this book - thank me later. I know you'll want to.

Jeffrey Thomas' DEADSTOCK provides a 'punktown' novel about a crime-ridden metropolis on a colony world home to numerous aliens. Jeremy is a private detective with uncontrollable special abilities and a serious of challenging clients. His adventures make for a very different alien setting.