Reddit reviews BAKEMONO (NOIRWAVE Book 1)

(reposting with an actual image of the cover; a bit new to reddit)


A month ago, I released the first half of a two-part story on Amazon, an unpublished project I'd been sitting on since about 2010 while trad-pub had me chasing my tail. I decided to go ahead and self-publish it in the midst of this resurgence of cyberpunk media. Sequel coming Soon™.

Its style is unashamedly Gibsonian and Chandleresque, and other (non-novel) influences include the 1998 film Dark City and the Deus Ex and Thief series of video games. And in classic Gibson style, the plot is constructed from multiple interconnected story threads—a cyborg detective infatuated with a Galatean gynoid, a blind thief and cryptovirologist whose eyes only let her see electronic telecommunication, a megacorp supersoldier with a century of combat training, and a wisecracking computer worm with chatterbot ancestry, among others.

Link here.

From Amazon:

>A century after the plague…

>A digitized humanity lives on in a simulation corrupted since the start, exiled by accident to a long-forgotten prototype city—an island in an endlessly looping black ocean. There, in the eternal night of a sky long deleted, under endless rains, the last living architects of the new world are plagued by a prophecy of numbers predicting a fatal system crash.

>Chizuru is a KAMI-class AI for whom years of recursive self-improvement have revealed to her the nature of her reality as a novel. Armed with this insight, she ends a decades-long isolation to enact her own repairs until an "accident" disables her surrogate body.

>She's forced to manipulate a cast of rogues into doing her bidding—the waging of a subtle war against the very same architects who would save the system. For her, the threat is not their digital end of days but something else out there, an enemy uncertain even to her.

The cover and interior art are the work of the talented Nolan Lu. Some of you might remember him from a previous post on this subreddit. You can also find him on Instagram (where he's uploaded some of the chapter illustrations) and on ArtStation.

And you can certainly ask me (almost) anything, as well.