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My name was S.P Doyle, and I was a subhuman parasite buried deep in the flesh of a dark god.
Hey, you guessed it.
I was a banker.
Please forgive me.
I've signed my name on my first ever mortgage loan, last month. Some people put themselves through that process several times over, in order to groom their capital, but I think these people are 1) insane 2) soulless or 3) both of these answers. It's fucking intimidating, OK? It's not anybody who can manage facing a faceless entity that literally own everything it touches, hoping it'll let you eventually own one thing if you're disciplined enough. SKULLCRACK CITY was my first swing at rugged bizarro fiction veteran Jeremy Robert Johnson and it was a boundless, inspiring and somewhat terrifying experience for a poor soul looking down the barrel of his first mortgage payment. It's unique, most definitely unique and it may or may not have a set of filed, carnivorous teeth.
S.P Doyle is the self-loathing employee of a nondescript bank wasting his life away on meaningless, dead end professional pursuits. Doyle eventually gathers enough courage to embark on a one man anarchist crusade to take the system down from within, but what he ends up against it greater and more terrifying than whatever he could imagine. His employer's in bed with a medical science firm named Delta MedWorks, who's running a savage and ambitious population control project based on a brand new drug called hexadrine, which Doyle has been an avid consumer of himself. Turns out he's got a lot more to be afraid about that unemployment and meaninglessness. There's an invisible war being waged and he's now a part of it.
The first name that came up to me when reading SKULLCRACK CITY is Philip K. Dick. It's a paranoid novel of conspiracy and constructed realities and that veers into a full blown cyberpunk universe after a couple chapters. The narrative it hyper and funny, but it's based on real and important philosophical questions: are we experiencing the entire scope of reality? are there power brokers and entities exercising a form of control over our lives? are all of out issues as a society interconnected in some way? If you had to box SKULLCRACK CITY into a specific genre it would be science-fiction, but like every good science-fiction novels, it's not really the future it examines, but a projection of our own reality and that's what kept it interesting from cover to cover, at least for me.
If you want to destroy a wasp nest you approach it slowly at the cool of dusk with the right poison in hand. What you don't do is wait until the hive is wide awake, chug a jar of moonshine until you're blind, strip naked, cover yourself in alarm pheromones, and bum rush the nest with your bare fists. Doing that kind of thing might create a mess you can't fix.
Doing that kind of thing might just end your life as you know it.
SKULLCRACK CITY is a heavily plot-driven novel that reads like you're in a state of hypnagogic delirium. S.P Doyle is a great character with a booming voice, but he really is the only standout character in the novel. Doyle exists independently of the plot, but every other character owes its purpose to his adventures and decisions, and the pace to which SKULLCRACK CITY is moving can be punishing at times. I'll admit to have lost the highway a couple times. Jeremy Robert Johnson keeps pushing the pace on the reader like a boxer who's trapped his opponent in the ropes and it'll lead you to sometimes be wondering what the hell you're reading. SKULLCRACK CITY is a demanding novel you need to read with your mind opened like a parachute, because it is one, long fall into a progressively more demented universe.
So, there you have it. SKULLCRACK CITY is a quirky, boundless, frantic and demanding novel that moves like a freight train that's out of control. It's ultimately a bizarro novel, but it'll appeal to fans of cyberpunk and conspiracy narratives both. I like to think of it as Philip K. Dick meets the Joe Rogan Experience. SKULLCRACK CITY is a challenging read that's anchored in the upbeat, visual prose of Jeremy Robert Johnson and the contemporary human experience in a technological society that left us all behind not that long ago. It oddly made me feel less alone, facing a lifetime of mortgage servitude. However nightmarish it might be, I thought that the act of stepping of the preordained path was an enlightening exercise.
