Ghost of the Neon God by T.R. Napper

Book Review

Robin C.M. Duncan

T.R. Napper is the award-winning author of the debut novel 36 Streets (2022), a fast-paced Cyberpunk thriller, the protagonist of which, Lin Vu, is as complex and conflicted an individual as you could wish to encounter in such a story. In ‘Ghost of the Neon God’, the author returns us to the nightmarish Eastern Hemisphere future he has envisioned.

Jackson Nguyen is a crook barely surviving on the mean, corporation-dominated streets of Melbourne. Things go south very quickly when he and his partner in petty crime encounter a fleeing Chinese businesswoman in a back alley. Misunderstanding leads to murder in the neon-drenched urban wasteland, and so begins a breathless chase from the corporate techno-jungle of future Melbourne out into the barren plains of Australia’s interior. Jack is running for his life, dragging the unsuspecting Sally with him, and things quickly get even worse for both of them when they discover the true impact of that grimy alley encounter. 

This novella is packed with the author’s trademark blackly energetic style, jammed with dark scientific developments enough to please the tech junkies and cyber-holics amongst us and quite possibly terrify the rest of us. Napper doesn’t pull his punches, as fans of his first novel know, and this is very much systematic skullduggery, as usual, the grim reality of rubbing up the ruling class the wrong way. Why bother reinventing Cyberpunk when the scenario is exactly as broken as it should be from page one?

Jack’s relationships with those around him (voluntary or otherwise) are, for me, the gems of this novella. There’s a core of humanity at the story’s heart, strongly expressed through the dialogue (spare though it often is) and the personal interactions that I think give the story real heft. This, more than any of the highly enjoyable components that make up ‘Ghost of the Neon God’, is the one that would almost make me go back to the beginning and read the bloody thing again straight away.

I could not be happier, therefore, to be going on from this novella to dive into The Escher Man, the author’s full-length follow-up to 36 Streets, set in the same unforgiving universe. The last body standing turns out the neon lights.