Book Review: The Escher Man by T.R Napper
The Australian Cyberpunk maestro returns with a cerebral crime thriller.
Titan Books, 2024
Eat. Kill. Sleep. Repeat. No room for growth, no chance to evolve. You’ll be the Escher Man. Stuck inside the painting, walking in an endless loop. An infinite journey to nowhere. To the beginning, again and again and again. Unable to love, to change, to be.
I tore through T.R Napper’s Ghost of the Neon God (Titan Books, 2024) in a single sitting earlier this summer; a novella-length car chase through the Australian Outback injected with the pace of Fury Road (2015), with Ghost in the Shell's (1995) moral quandaries.
In The Escher Man, we get a similar, superbly crafted narrative. Set in the same universe as Napper’s previous works, Neon Leviathan(Grimdark Magazine, 2020) and 36 Streets (Titan Books, 2022), the eponymous character is a haunted man, unravelling from an unending cycle of extreme violence perpetuated by an invasive, addictive technology. On the run from his estranged employer, Ebbinghaus journeys to the remote fringes of Vietnam to uncover an insidious conspiracy.
Control and liberty are hallmarks of Napper’s particular brand of cyberpunk; and he weaves a complex, interlocking plot, compounded by the elegance of the core mystery which makes for an extremely compelling, terrifying and thought-provoking read.
This review originally appeared in Dispatch Edition #1.
The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.
