Club Ded by Nikhil Singh

This is not an easy book to read. Wait, no, that’s an understatement. This book is straight-up difficult and disturbing. And yet, it’s also a damned good book.

The Club Ded of the title is two things. First, it’s a movie stuck in the last throes of production hell in a post-cyberpunk Capetown. Brick Bryson is called in by the movie’s director Del Croeser to save his over-budget, past-schedule project from an ignominious death. The only problem is, Brick and Croeser have a history that’s almost guaranteed to get in the way of their working relationship. Probably.

The second Club Ded is another thing entirely. A dark, twisted, hidden thing that … well, no spoilers. Suffice to say it’s just one of the many dark and twisted things that make this novel so damned uncomfortable to read.

As well as Brick and Croeser, there’s a whole veritable menagerie of other characters working their way under your skin and into your subconscious. Characters like Trill, the transvestite prostitute who just wants to have a good time but finds themselves getting pulled into the machinations of the rich and powerful. Or Sulette, the bored Boer housewife looking for darker and more disturbing thrills. Or Ziq, pickpocket and street philosopher. So many characters, in fact, that keeping track of them all becomes an almost Sisyphean task. There is so much going on in this book.

Stylistically it’s a frenetic, staccato assault on the senses. Broken sentences. Telling the story in short bursts. Representative of broken trains of thought. It’s almost as if William Gibson and Jeff Noon had a love child and then handed that child over to William S Burroughs for the wrong sort of literary education. Reading this book put me heavily in mind of Naked Lunch, and for that alone I love it.

As I said at the top, this is not an easy book to read. But it’s definitely worth the effort.