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 market 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. ( )

I could say that Deadstock is about one R & D project gone missing and two CEOs battling to find it first. But such a stark description would be like summarizing the first Oz book as 'Dorothy loses her way in a storm and has to find her way back home'.
Jeffrey Thomas' Punktown is a fascinating place. There are born mutants, made mutants, bio-engineered soldiers, interdimensional beings and living, sentient dolls. Needless to say, everybody has issues and those issues give you quite a bit to chomp on when you're not following the main plot. The story frame itself has a nice noirish flavor to it and it meshes well with the futuristic setting. Think Blade Runner. It's the kind of science fiction that makes you think, which is the best kind, really. If you're going through a cyberpunk phase, it's a must-read. ( )