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HarperCollins, UK, 1994 |
Dead Boys
HarperCollins, UK, 1994; St Martin's Press, US,
1996
'The sequel to Dead Girls is another perverse, stylish
assault on the sensibilities of readers. Primavera, the
cyborg-vampire - or Lilim - is gone but not forgotten; Ignatz Zwakh,
her human lover, has her sexual organs pickled in a whiskey bottle.
As Ignatz staggers through Asian bars and brothels in a haze of sex
and drugs, Primavera's remains give him visions of a possible future
where demonic "dead boys" - Elohim - exist to torture and kill
Lilim, a nightmare world that might be reaching back to change the
past … Is Calder exploiting pain or condemning cruelty? Readers will
have to wait for the third book in this troubling if fascinating and
superbly written trilogy, Dead Things, to
decide.'
Starlog
'In our contemporary world of twelve-year-old killers and
sixteen-year-old supermodels (who work in a field where burnout hits
by age twenty), it takes little extrapolative power to forecast a
future even more skewed toward the commodification of youth and
beauty, sex and death. But to tease from such bare extrapolations
their most outrageous implications, then to embody the theory in
believable characters moving through an ultra-tangible world seen
through a scrim of gorgeous, supercharged prose the likes of which
SF has seldom enjoyed - Ah, that takes the perverse genius of a
Richard Calder … Calder's first novel was the astonishing Dead Girls
… The sequel, Dead Boys, carries forward the tale with all of the
wild-eyed obsessional hysteria of its predecessor … With its
high-calorie, mucilaginous mix of Egyptology and Jack the Ripper,
Nabokov and Beardsley, flesh and metaphysics, Dead Boys croons like
Nine Inch Nails covering nostalgic music-hall
ballads.'
Asimov's
'Richard Calder's Dead Boys is the sequel, natch (although
its author's preferred title was Strange Genitalia), to Dead Girls,
arguably one of the best, and certainly one of the richest and
strangest, SF novels of the first half of the 90s … As in Dead
Girls, Calder brilliantly evokes a Third World seething with strange
out-of-control technologies and polymorphous perversions, and
sustains intense metaphorical riffs on the conjunction of sex and
death … It isn't an easy novel, and shows no mercy in either its
frank depictions of shockingly cruel sex or its impacted
self-swallowing plot, but there's no denying its disturbing
originality …'
Interzone
'Like the nineteenth-century decadents who have so clearly
inspired him, his strengths lie precisely in his imaginative
excesses; a more cautious writer, less disposed to the wantonness of
fantasy, could hardly have conceived these stories in the first
place. A more proximate decadent influence might well be Angela
Carter, to whose darkly exuberant fictions Calder seems to allude.
Calder belongs to that small, but apparently growing, cadre of
writers whose work crossbreeds the baroque reveries of
Postmodern-Gothicists like Carter with the hyperreal info-vistas of
cyberpunk … When the author manages to synthesize his disparate
influences into seamlessly personal prose, the result is often an
astonishing outburst of lyricism.'
The New York Review of Science Fiction
'Calder's penchant for allusive wordplay redolent with
references to B-movies and other SF stories produces scintillating
dialogue …'
Publishers Weekly |
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