Review: Falling Into Oblivion by Aaron M. Payne
Blurb:
MODIFICATIONS COME AT A PRICE.
Detective Sol Harkones is tangled in the wires of a deadly conspiracy involving defective body modifications causing permanent brain damage. A suspect is known, but something more dangerous may be lurking in the shadows.
A city plagued by waste.
Violence fills the streets.
Oblivion is within reach.
Falling Into Oblivion is the electrifying first book in the Tendrils of Chrome cyberpunk sci-fi series. If you're a fan of William Gibson's Neuromancer, HBO's True Detective, or Philip K. Dick’s Blade Runner, you will love Aaron M. Payne’s rapid-fire saga.
Review:
If you’ve been looking for True Detective mashed up with Blade Runner, then I think there may be something here for you to enjoy. Aaron M. Payne’s debut effort, the cyberpunk thriller Falling Into Oblivion, features intense moments, intriguing mysteries, betrayals, and cybernetic mods up the wazoo. It may not reinvent the formula, but it’s still a solid first entry in a new series to keep an eye on.
Down to his last credits, Detective Sol Harkones just needs one more big payday to ensure he can keep sending his daughters to a decent school. But on a job that seems simple enough—investigate some defective body mods that have done some real damage—he uncovers a tangled conspiracy that he is urged to drop. With the city now held in the clutches of a dangerous new drug, Harkones must decide what is most important: keeping his head, or ensuring a future for his daughters.
From the jump, this premise of the main character risking it all just to send his children to a good school was a refreshing twist on the hard-boiled cyberdetective. The penniless detective is certainly a worn-out trope, but adding this extra layer to Harkones’ backstory instantly made me more invested in his character than I would have had he been a penniless detective of the Harry Dresden flock. This is the major driving force behind all of his actions across the story, and Payne works it quite well. There is nothing Harkones wouldn’t do for his daughters, no matter the cost either to him or to those to whom he reports, and the desperation to which he sinks in pursuit of his investigation works great with the one simple motivating factor lurking in the background.
The central plotline in Falling Into Oblivion is focused on a drug conspiracy, and once that plot thread gets picked up, the story goes off to the races. A conspiracy that goes all the way to the top, uneasy alliances, unexpected betrayals, cybernetic muscles and mechamonsters, Payne throws them all into the mix in the latter half of the book and it makes for a thrilling back end of the story that turns Falling Into Oblivion into a strong page turner with a fantastic finale.
It’s not smooth sailing leading up to that point, though. The front half of the book tended to drag on a bit too much, with some scenes being spread out over multiple chapters when they would have been better served in a more concise single chapter. I will admit that I struggled through the first half of the book because of this, but the shorter overall length of the story does help alleviate this a bit. That said, the book as a whole is a bit hampered by stilted prose and dialogue that rarely flows from one sentence and doesn’t always paint a great picture of the scene. The brusqueness of the prose works well for some of the more action-oriented scenes, but across the rest of the novel, it did bring the experience down for me a bit.
Overall, though, Falling Into Oblivion is a solid debut with plenty for fans of the genre to enjoy. It has its warts, but if you’re looking for a fast-paced cyberpunk thriller, this is still a story I’d recommend giving a go. Now if you’ll excuse me, this book has given me the urge to dust off Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and cry at the finale again.
