Deadstock: A Punktown Novel

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.

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 ori

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.

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.

If you're looking for a well written creepy SciFi thriller, you've found your book. This here's a great little treat. Never read this author before, and will read more by him.