Mason Kowalski is stuck in a dead-end job he hates, writing copy for his boss at a health-food company while taking care of his elderly grandmother in his free time. He regularly experiences stress, due to a generalized anxiety disorder, but he becomes alarmed when he also suffers vivid hallucinations and debilitating headaches. When Mason’s boss confronts him about missing work, he experiences an episode that he accidentally captures on video—only to discover later that the recording lacks audio, aside from his own voice, which sounds as if he’s possessed: “the gruesome voice moans into his ears. Through lungs clogged with tar. Sick with infection. Steeped in nightmares.” Terrified, Mason confides in his best friend and neighbor, Cassy, but his life quickly unravels when he learns that his boss has been murdered—and that he’s the prime suspect. Later, Mason has another attack, during which he unwittingly forces the police to destroy evidence; he escapes custody, but he knows that the police will soon be on his trail. With no idea of how to prove his innocence, Mason, along with Cassy, turns to Rudy Davidson, a former Navy SEAL and current San Mateo police detective. Determined to understand Mason’s condition, the trio run experiments to identify its source to little avail; then Mason encounters a mysterious man with a “shadow” of his own. They soon learn the man has been investigating a suspected supernatural serial killer.
Casamassina, a novelist who’s best known for his work in video game journalism as a cofounder of IGN, crafts a fictional world that feels both cinematic and intimate. However, his ambitious blend of various genres and themes sometimes blurs the novel’s focus. His background in storytelling shines throughout; the novel offers a vivid sense of place and mostly tight plotting, and the brisk prose grounds the surreal narrative in believable rhythms of friendship. Mason is an endearing and sympathetic character whose struggles with anxiety feel authentic. Readers may wish for greater nuance in the supporting cast, though, as their archetypical portrayals sometimes reduce them to ideas, rather than fully realized individuals. The dialogue is punctuated by coarse and often vulgar language, which reinforces the story’s gritty atmosphere. The story, however, takes a drastic turn more than halfway through the novel, shifting from an urban supernatural mystery to a futuristic SF thriller—a lively but disorienting change that may not appeal to all readers. The narrative threads unravel toward the novel’s end in favor of an operatic showdown that will leave readers with more questions than answers. Still, the novel does effectively gesture toward social and ecological themes, depicting a world that’s truly damaged by human excess. These motifs, while fleeting, give the book a timely resonance that will appeal to fans of genre fiction that looks at contemporary issues through a fantastical lens.