From Publishers Weekly
Billed as a near-future thriller, Sagan's first novel plods through terrain all too familiar to SF readers. The narrator awakens with amnesia in a mysterious realm easily identified as a computer-generated virtual reality, fraught with metaphors and symbols. He slowly grasps that his name is Halloween, and that he may have murdered someone called Lazarus. Eventually, he realizes he's one of a handful of high school students attending "Immersive Virtual Reality" classes at the Idlewild IVR Academy, sponsored by the Gedaechtnis Corporation, a multinational biotech company. Intimidated by the villainous teacher, Maestro, and wary of his fellow students, Halloween is determined to recover his memory, apparently damaged in a power surge that threatened to destroy the IVR, and learn what really happened to the missing Lazarus. Despite a compelling twist near the middle, the low tension and meandering plot will likely frustrate the primary target audience, mainstream fans of such futuristic action films as The Matrix and Minority Report. Sagan may not be the next Philip K. Dick or William Gibson, but he shows enough talent here to suggest he can improve on pacing in the promised sequel.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From AudioFile
A teen named Halloween awakes from a nightmare convinced someone's out to kill him. Or was it only a virtual nightmare? For that matter, is HE real? In this dystopian future nothing is certain except that our hero is in mortal danger. He must save not only himself, but the entire human race. The lad himself tells the tale in this rousing sci-fi thriller, which is interrupted occasionally by virtual warnings from a cyborg voice (impersonated by Beth McDonald and aided by clever editing). As Halloween, Clayton Barclay Jones sounds appropriately young. Unfortunately, he also sounds inexperienced. After an energetic opening, he soon disengages from his text, which he merely recites with less technique than the material demands. Y.R. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine--
Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
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