PRIME time

(The cover art for Nate Kenyon's novella PRIME, by Russian artist Katja Faith)

From December 16 to January 23rd I’ll be in Vietnam — my seventh time there, but the first time my wife Hong will have returned since I brought her here in 2007, and it will be the first time our four-month-old daughter Jade will have gone there to meet her very excited relatives. (We’re also bringing my friend/coworker Tom F., to meet a lovely young lady we’ve introduced him to.) In the meantime, I’m trying to sneak in reading a few more books before the end of the year. And as I’ve been doing all year, here’s my mini-review of the latest book I’ve read — a novella called PRIME by Nate Kenyon, published by Apex Books.

I purchased this book at a signing I did on Halloween at Borders in Shrewsbury, MA, with Nate and some other local horror writers. Nate seems like a calm, confident guy, very pleasant. What initially drew me to this book, the first I’ve read by him, is the striking cover art I show above, by Russian artist Katja Faith. Her work has a wonderful sense of luminosity. Gorgeous stuff. See the link to her gallery, below.

The novella is a bit of Future Noir/Cyberpunkery, in which surly “bug hunter” Will Bellow goes in search of a deadly computer virus and in search of his own scrambled past. PRIME uses well-worn tropes of this subgenre, from Evil Corporations to memory manipulation to cloned characters to anti-Evil Corporation rebel movement to bad-ass martial arts expert/net savant protagonist, but hey, some of these are paths I’ve helped wear down myself in many a year past, primarily in my Punktown stories. This novella is fast-paced, bare bones stuff, but still thought-provoking…contemplating what it means to be human in a world of virtual reality and cloned flesh.  It’s a solid effort, and shows versatility from Kenyon, best known for his horror novels from Leisure. Maybe he’ll do something longer in this vein down the road, maybe even bringing back Will Bellow for some more ass-kicking bug hunting.

Order PRIME from publisher Apex Books: http://www.apexbookstore.com/collections/frontpage/products/prime-by-nate-kenyon

And do check out the fantastic gallery of PRIME’s cover artist Katja Faith: http://katjafaith.deviantart.com/