Bloody Books Review - Spares by Michael Marshall Smith
Whilst "Real Life Things " are taking up my time, I'm going to publish some Fluffenhammer Adjacent stuff that I've been sitting on for a while. We start with a look at the cyberpunk horror-thriller "Spares" by Michael Marshall Smith
SPARES, BY MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
I'm going to have to be transparent here, and speak about how I came to this book before describing it. This was given to me to read over a weekend by someone I went on a few dates with back in the early 2000s. She said that since reading it, it became infectious, and she needed to pass the infection on to others. Over the years I have bought this book no less than sixteen times, and have handed copies out to various people as she was absolutely correct.
It is infectious.
The story follows Jack Randall, a retired/recovering soldier who took part in a military experiment that I would still struggle to fully explain. More on that later. He finds employment as a cop in a crashed MegaMall, which normally would be a five mile cuboid flying city until it crashed and became New Richmond. The revenge murder of his family during this part of his life sends Jack into a spiraling psychotic break, and he escapes New Richmond to become a maintenance worker on a Spares Farm, with a service droid as the only company. Whilst there, He discovers enough of himself to both get clean of his narcotics addition, but also break free the Spares from the farm and make an escape back to New Richmond.
You may be wondering I've given the story away, but worry not, for all this happens before the book begins. This is all told in flashback in clever, logical ways to fill in Jack's backstory as we try to keep up with the speedy narrative in which we are now held.
The book is full of horror of both a psychological and physical manner. The aforementioned Spares are clones the wealthy have created of themselves and children as insurance. They are kept in confinement and used, literally, for spare parts. The fact that these Spares have no rights, and the fact that the rich kids they are cloned from have no ability to learn or grow responsible from their actions creates a horror that feels more prescient now than it did in the year 2000. It is a funny, yet horrifying book with one section having being burnt into my brain with it's visceral violence. There are some truly incredible moments of levity too, often coming in from the sci-fi setting's technology. If the passage about the sounds modern laser guns make, and why no-ones uses them does not make you laugh, or The Gap does not make you want to run from the book, you may actually have died.
Jack, in true cyberpunk fashion, is a man beset by demons. As the page count carries you along, it becomes apparent that those demons are circling, getting closer, and have links to each other that are masterfully kept invisible until Smith deigns the time is right to start unlocking the doors. Even then, he does not open everything at once and the origami of the pattern unfolds in a manner both unsettling and truly striking.
There's a tightrope here in Smith's writing. He manages to balance a lot of an American cyperpunk feel with a British voice, loading the scenarios with snark that easily could have been in one of the top-tier 2000AD tales. The epilogue does feel a little forced, but by that point, the darkness held in the heart of the book has soaked through every page, and to have such a whiplash shift after the book had wrapped everything up is somewhat jarring. But, Importantly, it does not detract from what is and was a book that should have started a new wave of UK cyberpunk.
It's Infectious