Metro Kinetic

For those of you who are already fans of Bowyer's work, this book is a slam-dunk. Stop reading this and go read it instead.

For those unfamiliar or unsure if "Metro Kinetic" might be a good fit for you, a bit of context:

When I think of Brian Bowyer's writing style, the phrase "controlled chaos" springs to mind. Brian is one of only a handful of authors I've come across who's essentially mastered the art of being able to shift tone, pace, and narrative flow on a dime in ways that would be so risky and potentially catastrophic to the reading experience if mishandled that I can't help but think of them as brave.

In my mind, the best speculative fiction asks a tantalizing question, then delivers one or more interesting, entertaining, thought-provoking, or ideally all of the above, answers to it. That's exactly what "Metro Kinetic" does, bluntly asking the reader with its harrowing opening chapter, "What if the world were so chock-full of deranged substance-abusing sociopaths that their existence and behaviors were effectively normalized? What would that look like?"

I'm admittedly being a bit hyperbolic as there are a handful of examples of "normal" characters present throughout the read but one of many things Bowyer does quite effectively and cleverly throughout it is to blur the line such that even the most seemingly-predictable of them can rarely be easily rooted for or written off completely, often making them complex and compelling regardless of which side of the societal or moral fence they end up landing on in the end.

There are so many additional things I could say about this book and so many worthwhile discussions that could be had regarding various aspects of it but I'm going to refrain from doing that as I feel most of them are better experienced and conjured by a reader, rather than described and pitched in a review. That said, I will give the standard "warning" and "heads up" I always feel compelled to provide when recommending transgressive fiction such as this to others: If you're easily offended, if you're easily triggered, upset, or disturbed by the sorts of things that typically warrant such warnings, this probably isn't the book for you. I'd also add that if you're new to Bowyer's work in particular, you may want to start with one of his short-fiction collections such as "Sinister Mix" and work your way up to "Metro Kinetic," both to get a sense of his style and his typical subject matter, and because there are at least a few references to his other works in this book that were fun to catch being familiar with them before reading it. Notably, there's a chapter in "Metro Kinetic" that's basically a retelling of one of the stories from "Sinister Mix," with a very different outcome in its new iteration. I therefore suspect there are even more references I didn't catch, not being familiar with all of his books, but I feel reasonably confident saying there's a lot on offer here in that regard based on the few I did spot.