THE DIMENSIONS OF A CAVE

Amid the convergence of dream, memory, and virtual reality, an investigative reporter suspects he's being played.

If this debut novel had a soundtrack, its theme song could be Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” and this would be the key line: “You know something’s happening but you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?” A veteran journalist, Quentin Jones definitely knows something is happening—something involving emergent technology, the erosion of privacy, and the amoral exercise of power by both government and private enterprise. A piece involving some of this had been spiked by his newspaper, even though it was well sourced, because of pressures from above. Whether causal or coincidental, his romantic relationship had crumbled as well, while he was on leave from the paper. Undaunted, he plunged deeper into his investigation that nobody wanted him to report, and he discovered that he had barely scratched the surface. He unearthed a corruptive and corrosive hellhole, with a heart of darkness that is way darker than anything Conrad could conjure. Is humanity really this relentlessly inhuman? Or is this some sort of elaborate video game? The book's framework is a further source of mystification, as Jones isn’t narrating his story directly but rather telling it to a group of reunited journalists, friends from j-school, and this group must be wondering if their friend has lost his mind—not to mention wondering how he manages to recall page after page of dialogue that is often more like soliloquy. The backstory becomes foregrounded, focusing on a former protégé of Jones’, an embedded journalist gone rogue, now feared dead. Somewhere in this vortex where past meets present, perhaps some answers lie.

There is a shuddering power to this relentlessly grim narration.