Coming Attractions | An Invitation to the Afterparty

I'll make no bones about it, nor any rotten appendages: I loved Raising Stony Mayhall. Alongside The Reapers are the Angels, it was easily one of the best zombie novels in recent years. It demonstrated, as I wrote in my review for Starburst Magazine, that "whatever people may say, there's plenty life left in the undead yet."

Ever since the publication of Raising Stony Mayhall in late 2011, I've been wondering what Daryl Gregory would do next. Now, thanks to the new catalogue Tor put out recently... now I know.

I thought you should, too.

Afterparty promises to be "powerful, violent science fiction in the tradition of William Gibson and Peter Watts." I've grabbed a cap of the cover art from the catalogue — see above — and the blurb below:

It begins in Toronto, in the years after the smart drug revolution. Any high school student with a chemjet and internet connection can download recipes and print drugs, or invent them. A seventeen­-year-­old street girl finds God through a new brain-­altering drug called Numinous, used as a sacrament by a new Church that preys on the underclass. But she is arrested and put into detention, and without the drug, commits suicide. 

Lyda Rose, another patient in that detention facility, has a dark secret: she was one of the original scientists who developed the drug. With the help of an ex-­government agent and an imaginary, drug­-induced doctor, Lyda sets out to find the other three survivors of the five who made the Numinous in a quest to set things right. 

A mind­bending and violent chase across Canada and the US, Afterparty is a marvelous mix of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, and perhaps a bit of Peter Watts’s Starfish: a last chance to save civilization, or die trying.

There's been no word of a UK release date as yet, but Afterparty is slated for publication in the United States next April. I'll be there... how about you?

Before I say good day, let me flag up a few other notable new books brought to light by way of Tor's new catalogue, which you can read in its entirety here: there's The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell — the sequel to London Falling—a particularly promising new weird novel, namely Unwrapped Sky by Rjurik Davidson, and last but not least, The Revolutions, a "glorious planetary romance" by Felix Gilman.

Is it wrong of me to be wishing the days between now and next April away?