Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things

Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things #1-3

by Richard Calder

This extraordinary trilogy depicts a future gender war that crosses the boundaries of software, wetware, time, and reality itself in its imaginative leaps and bounds. Only love holds the future together in this tale of star-crossed teens whose transformations defy description or imagination.

To read this trilogy is to behold a strange new world, one unlike any other.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Horror, Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Cyberpunk, New Weird

400 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 1993

Reviews

[Szplug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dead Girls : Adam's review does a nice job of laying out the sources for Calder's bizarre splash of rainbow mayhem—sexual, interpersonal, technological, civilizational, political, dimensional—though the prevailing ones in the opening book of the trilogy would have to be Moorcock's Cornelius and Gibson's Neuromancer, with a splash of Nabokov and hints of Bataille by-the-bye. I expected the sex to be a bit more explicit than proved to be the case, though Calder manages an assured mixture of the erotic, the comical, the enigmatic, and the disturbing in his entertaining originality, depicting a gynoid-obsessed world wherein female automatons and simulacra are endowed with nanotechnological life seemingly solely to satisfy the motley lusts of the testicle-toting divide of the global populace. This dark, leering, and rage-tinged essence has reached its apotheosis in the Lilim, the vampiric robot-grrls who incarnate the fallen state of a future Europe that, reaching back into the late eighteenth century to bring the air of decadence and aura of high culture well into the twenty-first as a marketing ploy, has been infected by this biotech version of Lilith's curse. What was the top-of-the-line in this artificial servant category—the Cartier Dolls—assumed, through the mutative wonder of quantum nature, the characteristics of a modern-day, saliva-envenomed vampire, through the latter of which were passed subatomic pathogens into the reproductive organs of all the human male partners who had succumbed to these sinful robots' übererotic allure. Subsequently, these semen-infected fathers would sire human daughters who, upon pubescence, morphed into waxy-skinned, plastic-and-steel framed, raven-tressed, emerald-eyed, needle-fanged asskickers, capable of manipulating the inherent weirdness of the Quantum world in order to work magic and oneiric will upon a simultaneously intoxicated and repulsed populace. Speaking of the latter, with one half of their offspring potentially (and growingly) doomed to dollhood, their numbers are dropping precariously, and both dolls and humans desire to flee the chaos of an interdicted Old World in order to find new avenues for existence; in the case of our teenaged protagonists—doll junkie Ignatz "Iggy" Zwakh and his girl/gynoidfriend Primavera Bobinski, who has just finished her complete transformation into a pubescent Lilim—the loud, crazed, urban pornocracy of a doll-stacked Bangkok.

I don't want to say much more about the plot, 'cause it's a frenetic thing , puzzling at times, quirky, amusing, a carnival thrill-ride. Calder was living in Thailand when he penned it back in 1991—parked right amidst what was even then a thriving sex tourism industry—and Dead Girls includes the latter within its selected targets, while also examining the future perils of a runaway and all-catering capitalism, romantic longing and nationalistic queue-jumping, scientific god-playing with advanced, nature-nudging technology, and, leading the pack, the myriad ways in which misogyny thrives however we configure our world. The Lilim have been bred from that inky region of the male psyche where the words whore and bitch and cunt rear as hissing cobras, inveigling their poisoning spirit into these prettified Cartier dolls originally concocted in a saccharine style of Pollyanna purity and coy cupidity. Now these vampiric, nanotech-bearing succubi are wreaking their own sexual vengeance upon the world, to the degree that the alarmed governments amongst the still-powerful nations are wavering between strategies to slaughter the dolls and to come to terms with them. The need to humiliate and denigrate in order to gratify, the linkage between sexual desire and the death drive, and the strive to dominate, in both sexes, to overpower those who think they hold the whip, surface throughout; but, in the end, Calder opts to allow the story top priority, to race along even if the intriguing and troubling questions raised in the moment seem to be enveloped by the narrative's smoking tires.

And you know, that's just fine with me—because what actually works best about Dead Girls, and against the odds, really, when you consider how its tale was constructed, is the love story between childhood-robbed, teenaged exiles Iggy and Primavera. I'm a fucking sucker for a well-done, convincing work through of that grand old emotion merging two individual souls into a stronger, better, buttressed one; and, notwithstanding the punchy dialogue, splatter violence, smutty depravity, and Pow! Bam! panel-play when the novel (de)ascends to the realm of the cartoon, Calder pulls it off marvelously. Primavera is a Lilim, by its very malevolent nature incapable of love; and Iggy—whose native English society has taken to publicly executing Lilim like a modern Transylvanian mob—is a doll-junkie, addicted to the pleasures carried within the latter's neo-vampiric saliva, an amoral vagrant who led Primavera to the foul gates of murder. Yet, despite all of these character flaws and impediments, the brutal existential circumstances and environments through which they must wend, their loyalty and love is painted in hues that not only convince, but actually prove touching. I knew exactly where Calder was bringing things to seal the deal at the end of the book, what the fate for these two sorely-tried kids was going to be: and damn if, when it all came to pass as expected, I didn't resignedly shake my head and mutter Ah, you fucking bastard, Calder. And after the cavalcade of differing emotions and sensations and pleasures I had experienced in this brief-but-quite-enjoyable textual ride, closing it all with a bemused melancholy seemed somehow right. Well done, dude.

Dead Boys : I made it around thirty pages into DB before setting it aside; thicker prose, planetary transposition, nastier knuckling and naughtier nookie (or was that the other way around?)—I was liking it, but I'm feeling the pressures of limited time/unlimited books something fierce these days. I must get a handle on the stacks overflowing before my eyes, so I'm temporarily shelving Calder—I think I've the gist of the entirety, or at least enough to satisfy for the moment—until I've added a few more different and highly-desired notches to the book belt.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Calder’s Dead trilogy is a Frankenstein monster made up of masturbatory fantasies about anime, serious fevered study of De Sade and Bataille, love of the baroque prose of Nabokov and Angela Carter, and fin de siecle decadence held together with cyperpunk wiring and then torn to pieces with narrative scatterbombs from Burrough’s Nova trilogy and Moorcock’s Cornelius Quartet. If you don’t like these references, you won’t like Calder.

[Charlie George · Rating 5 out of 5]

I anticipated a mind-scrambling, reality-bending book of epic proportions, but this exceeded all expectations. It is among the most remarkable books I've ever read.

In a future where the world has become obsessed with fashion, a kind of nanotechnology virus infects girls to turn them into "dolls", which might best be described as android-vampires. The dolls endure ostracism, extermination, and finally ascension into extra-dimensional demi-gods as the epidemic spreads.

Among the bewitching ideas at play is that because the nanotech robots operate on such small scales, they employ quantum effects to defy "Euclidean" reality and create parallel worlds akin to cyberspace. Evidently, the dark fantasies of the virus's creator acted as a template for the dolls' genetic proclivities. Hinted at in the first book/part Dead Girls, Calder launches this premise into the stratosphere in the second book (Dead Boys), wherein history itself seems to have been re-written by and for the infected. Or perhaps the future has devolved to resemble the dark dreams of the past. The third book, Dead Things is set in the present (1990’s), but it is an alternate present, warped by future events related in the previous two books, and riddled with flashbacks of Primavera and Iggy’s earlier/alternate lives throughout history (and future). As the story progresses, some of the dolls, our protagonists among them, take it upon themselves to undo alterna-creation, to exterminate all life, history, and un-reality. Partly for retribution against the crimes of mankind, and partly because it is in our nature, and therefore the dolls’ nature, to seek entropy and oblivion.

Not making much sense? It has to be read to be believed. I hesitate to say 'understood' because the story is inscrutable, paradoxical, and deliberately disorienting. Not an easy read, but a fascinating one. Trying to summarize the story in any way was an exercise in futility so I'm done with that.

Fittingly, the book dilates time and threshes my psyche such that each and every page took 5 minutes to read. The nihilistic prose and exotic vocabulary grated my nerves for the first 20 pages, but once I bought into it, I did an about-face and came to relish the way it is written.

The only thing that remains to be commented upon, indeed a glaring omission from this review, is the boundless prevalence of sex and violence in the narrative. This is not a book for anyone with an even remotely delicate sensibility. The level of depravity is without measure; allusions to Marquis de Sade are not overblown. A small sample of the recurring terminology gives a flavor, if you'll let your imagination run to the most debauched implications:

marauder; fellatrix; slink-riven; sex-traitress; girl-meat; Metasex; the bellyspike; superfemeninity...

The language is beautiful and delicious, fiendish and treacherous. Words like "twisted" fall short of the mark. I do not have the words to describe those of Calder. That’s why you have to read them.

Don’t expect explicit sex and violence in the modern, Hollywood sense. It is not a romance novel, nor is it action-packed. Calder regards reality as tyranny, and reveres sex-death as "a loving cruelty." The most bizarre love story ever told.

I’d like to claim that the book was right up my alley, but frankly, it ran circles around me. I try to avoid histrionics, wary of the boy who cried wolf, but this one threw me sideways. It is high-brow smut, eulogizing the connection between sex and death. This is the central theme of the book—death of the body, of gender, of reality, of time and causation, and of the universe, all for lust, loss and love. Annihilation as the cosmic Demiurge. LSD in printed-word-form, available to you for the low, low price of $15.95. Oh ghod, I'm talking like him now! Get out of my mind, Richard, you fiend!

[knig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dead girls only: then I stopped (loved it TOO much maybe). This book will be a film one day. It reads like a film.

Primavera Bobinski is 12 and turning into a doll in postapocalyptic London, ravaged by doll-disease. Iggy sits behind Primavera in class and loves her. When it becomes apparent the authorities will terminate Primavera (as they do all dolls), the two run away to the subterranean tunnels of central London where Titania, the Queen of dolls, will help them escape. This is what Tatiana’s place feels like:

http://youtu.be/-DVQM17t2mU


Fast forward four years: Primavera has metamorphosed into a full fledged doll, and Iggy is a doll junkie: he can’t lie without the nano in her saliva. This is how the metamorphosis looked to me:

http://dai.ly/cm3gaZ


And Primavera now looks like this:



And secret agents chase them through bizarre pixel worlds and everyone ends up inside Primavera’s dreams.

And, well, things don’t turn out so well.....

[Boden Steiner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fearless.
Fearless imagination--in concept, sentence, story, execution.
Fearlessly published.

Ahead of it's time, but also, out of time, timeless.

Unlike any book you are likely reading.

You may not like aspects of subject, you might be challenged by time and place, details in the prose. You will eventually embrace these things, recognize brilliance, realize that you have found something unique.

Best thing I've read in some time (maybe since discovering Steve Erickson), affecting me on all levels I look for in a novel. I gladly list it among my favorite works.

I wish there were more books like this.

[T. · Rating 4 out of 5]

For starters, I want to establish that I haven't completed the whole series; however, that is not an accurate gauge of my reaction to this trilogy. It's just that I bought the thing in its entirety instead of individually (as I prefer to read books in the same series) and tried to tough it all out in one go. It's taken me long enough to get to Dead Things, and the backlog of books I have lined up for myself has become daunting. So, on that note, I retire this series until sometime a little later down the line.

On to the juicy parts.

This extraordinary trilogy depicts a future gender war that crosses the boundaries of software, wetware, time, and reality itself in its imaginative leaps and bounds. Only love holds the future together in this tale of star-crossed teens whose transformations defy description or imagination.

To read this trilogy is to behold a strange new world, one unlike any other. - Goodreads

I first read Dead Boys in 2009 while I was still in high school, and I could not put it down for the life of me. (I even took it on a vacation to Austin. See?)



When I finished, years passed before I realized it was the second in a trilogy, and desperate to rekindle any hope I had in humanity that had been depleted by reading too much bullshit, I dove headfirst into Richard Calder's (only?) trilogy. It begins with Dead Girls.

Nanoengineers have unleashed machine consciousness. Revenge does not account for it: Something infinitely more sinister has happened. Only Primavera and mad Ignatz Zwakh know what power is really behind the microbiotic army dedicated to overthrowing the human gamete. But Primavera's dying. Can they reach Dr. Toxicopholous before the CIA or the pornocrat Kito or their combined assassins and nanomachines reach them? - Goodreads

In Dead Girls, Ignatz Zwakh lives in a highly technological world powered by fear, sex and death. A plague that corrupts young girls by turning them into Lilim--vampiric nanoengineered dead girls--has swept the globe one metamorphosis at a time. Ignatz, as a schoolboy, falls in love with a Lilim, Primavera. Together, they discover the truth and tragedy behind the plague.

By the time I got around to reading Dead Girls, Dead Boys was a far-off memory that vaguely reminded me of women dying on spikes, perverse sex-driven deaths, stylistic prose and green. Dead Girls was a far cry from my recollection but not in an unpleasant way. Ignatz's appetite for disaster is so prevalent throughout that, even though the chapters alternate between the past and the present, I can't help but want the same even as I watch its dire consequences. The history and evolution of the world's reaction to the plague felt real and concise. The Human Front, which stands against these young women who use men to pass on their tainted genes, sounds as plausible as any.

Not to discount the strangeness of it all, though.

Cruel Hospitals where Lilim-in-progress are sent by frightened parents; overzealous schoolboys who learn from bad examples and torture for fun; propaganda and escape; the pornocracy of the Big Weird, the life and city that Iggy had followed the woman he loves into; dead girls with gingivitis, hemline psychosis, vagina dentata and a sordid desire to die at the hands of a man mid-orgasm...

That's only the tip of the iceberg.

Shells burst behind my eyes; I was her beachhead, first blood in a guerrilla war against humanity. Fifth columnists leaped from her spittle, a microrobotic army dedicated to overthrowing my gametes. They infiltrated in their billions. Ignoring Y, digging into X, they would wait, wait for me to fill a human womb so that they might stage their coup and set up a puppet government.

A blue-white flash.

Tombstones. The coach. The fall of night.

Primavera was eating my brain.

I awoke from post-coital sleep on the hard floor of the pavilion, my head rich with traces of midsummer dreams.

- Dead Girls, p. 24-25

Oh, this is a dirty ride. Filthy, nasty and crazy. I loved every minute of it. And, as provided by the excerpt above, the writing was marvelous to boot. It's unapologetic in its use of the unconventional, the frowned-upon, and that's the kind of thing I admire. Not included were the Francophilic and Asian (Thai?) cordon sanitaires and klongs, etc. They can be hard to read around if you know nothing about any language other than English or how to use context clues; most are, though, pretty transparent. Such as:

Bond Street was a desert of broken glass and gutted shopfronts, a desecrated memorial to the belle époque. Primavera rescued some tattered couture from the gutter. She held it up, gauging its appeal.

- Dead Girls, p. 61

What begins as a simple story of one young man's attempt to escape a life he doesn't know to get on without quickly transmogrifies into a series of discoveries that all lead back to sex--and death.

Dead Boys is nothing like its predecessor. It's denser, more intricate, less dialogue-heavy and much, much darker.

Ignatz Zwakh lives in a strange world. Dead Girls, the genetically recombined doll-girls designed by Dr. Tocixophilous, have now mated with humans to form a new subspecies. Meta, the parasitic cyborgs who resulted, have carried the new genus into space. Mars has been colonized and in its most decadent city, Paris, marauding Elohim strive to execute the traitorous Dead Girls. Bangkok swelters from its sex bars to its alleyways with the strange sexuality the future has brought. The future has begun to invade the past and reality shifts and shimmers as the Meta wage their war. Ignatz Zwakh is a very strange man in a very strange world. - Goodreads

Six months after the death of his love, Ignatz has become a true doll junkie--he takes injections of pure allure, a mystical substance at every Lilim's disposal, from the disembodied sex organs of his long-lost dead girl, Primavera. It is through this "CPU" that he receives a letter from his daughter, Vanity St. Viridiana, in a future where she is hunted--and by none other than himself; a future where Primavera and Ignatz were never lovers but siblings; a future where a man named Dagon is terrorizing dead girls in only the way a dead boy can.

...If men turn girls into cats, cats turn men into marauders...

- Dead Boys

That's right. Dead Boys is about none other than our favorite marauder, Ignatz Zwakh, as he struggles to keep his head--and reality--straght, even taking up on Mars and taking up with a human.

It can get confusing if you don't pay attention to what's going on, but it's not terribly difficult. Harder than Dead Girls, yes, but not a deduction point. As I said before, it's dense. The first page is one long paragraph, and--being honest here--most of the pages are made up of big, long paragraphs. But it's worth the eyesore because we learn so much about the world through it. It's dark, green, sex, death, technology, cyberawesome, blood, time-travelish and even more green still. And there are Elohim--male counterparts to Lilim; reactive forces, almost. They are perfect solutions to girls who weeks death--boys who seek to kill girls who seek death.

As in Dead Girls, the writing is so powerful, so rich, so individual and so fuckin beautiful that I continually drool over it. My personal favorite quote ever of all time in life belongs to Dead Boys, in fact--

Today the city melted in a heat wave. The crystal skyscrapers glittered like knives (this is a city of knives), steel-and-glass blades inlaid with the reflections of other knives, mirrors within mirrors within mirrors, knives that thrust up at the scorched clouds, presaging that evening's little death… As always, beneath the vaulted brilliance the infernal shadows of the streets were filled with the phantoms of murdered girls.

- Dead Boys, p. 240

The skyway was a convolvulus of shadows, a helix entwining a ziggurat of smoked glass from penthouse to the killing ground of the streets.

- Dead Boys, p. 152

Yep. :D If you're expecting something like Dead Girls or lighter, you may be disappointed by how heavy Dead Boys is. However, if you're like me, and you live for this shit, and appreciate the sick, twisted universe of these Dead things, then dive right in.

Having completed his trip around the universe, Dagon (also know as Ignatz Zwakh) returns to Earth to plant a Reality Bomb that will wipe out the plague of Meta (which turns teenage girls into Dead Girls). Unfortunately, Dagon himself has set loose forces that are collapsing both time and space upon itself, turning his simple mission into a fun-house-mirrored tour through identity, reality, and undying love. - Goodreads

Speaking of dead things, the last of the trilogy lost me about 4 chapters in. Not that anything's wrong--I'm just tired of it. It's even more confusing and warped than Dead Boys and no less imaginative. Give it a shot if you enjoyed the other two Deads. As for me, I shall have to return another time (and, with glee, I someday will); until then, I leave you with this dazzling quote from Dead Things:

I look down at her in contempt, my whole body tumescent, unappeasable, head, torso, arms and legs in riotous sympathy with a penis hard as rock; a penis harder, indeed, than it has been thousands of years, my permanent, intransigent erection growing in exponential relation to my cruelty, a penis that is now, surely, a googolplex of a penis. A penis100.

No respite for the wicked.

- Dead Things, p. 275

Dead Girls ✩✩✩✩✩ 5 stars. Amazing.
Dead Boys ✩✩✩✩ 4 stars. I loved it.
Dead Things (did not finish).
Series overall ✩✩✩✩ I loved it. Easily a favorite. Ever.

ALSO POSTED AT MY BLOG.

[Darin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t know. I don’t think this book knew what it wanted to be, leading to myself not knowing what I was reading. To summarize, this book tried to be a classic, science fiction smut, and something with a take on capitalism, technology, embracing sexuality, racism, and sexism.

All of this just turned out to be word vomit spread throughout 400 pages. It drowned out the actual plot of the book. The addition of multiple universes, the character living multiple lives, time travel, and a changing identity just led to more confusion.

This book was so close to being a do not finish. I am glad I read the whole thing because it did to start making some sort of sense and I don’t feel completely in the dark. I have also never read something besides a text book with so many parentheses and footnotes.

Science fiction is not my favorite genre so that may be why I couldn’t get into it. If you are a fan, I’m sure there are other books that feel a little more clear and complete.

[Jennifer · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is only the second book I've ever not finished through to the end. I got through the first part of the Trilogy, Dead Girls, but just couldn't take any more torture. I constantly had to keep re-reading paragraphs to figure out if a new scene had started. None of the characters are developed enough to actually form any connection and I found myself just not caring what happened to them. I was actually hoping one of the main characters would just die already to make it interesting! The vocabulary in this book was so dense that I had to keep a list to look words up for nearly every page. This was very distracting and prevented me from fully engaging in the book. All that said, I think the premise of the book is a fascinating idea, if it were written by someone else.

[Ross Lockhart · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m only about two-thirds through this one, since other books keep jumping up and yelling “read me!” But so far I’m far enough down the rabbit hole to say that Calder’s trilogy is a Trevor Brown painting come to life, told through lush, decadent prose reminiscent of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition or Burroughs’s The Ticket That Exploded by way of the Marquis De Sade. Not a book for the faint of heart, but if the prospect of adolescent schoolgirls transformed into vicious vampiric gynoids holds an appeal for you, then look no further than Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things.

[Book Nerd · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Teenage Mutant Robot Vampires" is a minimalist review I've heard of this book.

Dead Girls is one of those books, movies, or tv series finales that makes you feel like you've been kicked in the head and leaves you walking around in a haze for a couple of days.
People usually say the sequels aren't as good and they are a step down but I think they're also just harder to understand. Information virus traveling backward through time overwriting history is a weird concept but I think Dead Boys(originally titled Strange Genetalia) and Dead Things were great in their own right.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

I sold my copy a few years ago... Looking back on it now, I can't remember why. This was an interesting story. Not a screamingly great trilogy but a good one just the same. It mashed up some bits of nanotech futureshock with classic vampire myths and the ever fun Madonna/Whore symbolic cues. It gets a little "out there" toward the end of the trilogy, as I recall but still manages to deliver an entertaining and (at times) thought-provoking read.

[Tricia]

An erotic world of robotic vampire women named Lilim, sprung from a mechanic virus that otherwise sits docile until puberty; whose main goal in life is to protect their most valuable asset - their wombs and its attachments - and their male prey, who are either their addicted followers or ruthless hunters.

[Zwahk Muchoney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best cyberpunk series I've ever come across by far, this book almost has a color that it emanates as you read the pages, a neon green that permeates your brain as you are taking the through this strange and terrifying world of nanomachine disease. The second half of the book (Dead Boys) annoyed me very much the first time I read it but after going through the entire novel and starting again from the beginning with the second read through I had a great appreciation for its depiction of the dissolution of time and space. If you're looking for an unusual cyberpunk science fiction book with a darker tone there's a good chance you might enjoy this one.

[Nicole]

I'm holding off on giving this book a rating as I intend to reread it.
I had this book assigned for a university course in cyberpunk literature I took several years ago. I ended up reading only Dead Girls, as I had an overwhelming amount to read that quarter, but found what I did read strange, dark, and unforgettable. I don't remember much of the writing style or even the exact arc of the plot, however, many of the themes of the book have not yet left me, from the idea of female children infected with a disease that transforms them into AI sex dolls at puberty in retribution for the lustful sins of their fathers, to hods towards Peter Pan and the German tradition of Totenkindergeschichte (dead children stories) whether Pan is actually in that category or not. The idea of living human girls transforming into, unchanging, and therefor unliving (by the definitions of the world within Dead Girls at least) robots so that they never grow up is a thoroughly fascinating one on many levels.

I attribute this book, as well as several others from the reading list of the same literature class, to planting the seed of fascination for zombie stories, vampire stories and stories of plagues, both fictional not.

All that being said- this book is not for everyone. It is, explicit in depictions of sex, violence and sexual violence, including rather vivid descriptions of torture and some odd things about dismembered reproductive organs. If such things won't completely overshadow your reading experience with disgust, read at least the first book, you won't soon forget it.

[Kitty]

I've actually only begun this trilogy and only reached around page 55. I wanted to add it to my books mainly to remind myself I had started it (I wish there was an option on Goodreads that covered trying a book but giving up on it ). I didn't rate it because I don't think my initial distaste for it would be a fair review in the slightest.
I really enjoy cyberpunk (not to mention microbiological fiction ) and was hoping for something along the lines of Justina Robson's work. I was very much enjoying the east Asian setting, but the writing was just too harsh and abrupt for my taste. The sexual violence and detachment was at a level that made me uncomfortable reading.
I may attempt this again someday, since it seems to have good reviews and apparently if I just give it a longer chance it will improve, but for now it just wasn't happening.

[Kaley Buck · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't even know where to start with thinking about this book. If I had read each book in the trilogy individually, I don't know that I would have continued to the next book.

The first book was confusing but not so much that I couldn't follow it. The journey makes sense.

The second book rakes the world and flips it on its head. Almost literally. Everything has fallen apart and we don't know why. I found it very hard to follow.

The third, and final, book finally gives us sense of what has happened to the world. Why things happened the way they happened. But in all honesty, the series was a total mind fuck.

[Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really reallly reallllly liked the "Dead Girls" story at the beginning of this book, but by the time "Dead Boys" started I felt like he was attempting to carry a torch that had burned low, and allowed his protagonist to become catastrophic and unexciting. After awhile, Calder's poetics turned into dribble and was incoherent to the point of being boring. I am not a book snob when it comes to this writing style, as "Naked Lunch" is written in the same fashion and I didn't have such a hard time with it.

[becca sporky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Its kind of like the Matrix.... with robots and vampires and time travel. I like that the love story is a secondary factor of the book, not a primary one. This book gets extremely wordy, and I had trouble understanding it, because of all the futuristic descriptions and made up words. It took me a long time to finish this book, because of what I previously mentioned... but if you can get around that, its an entertaining read.

[Julian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first book in this trilogy (collected together in this edition) is stunning. The language, the characterization, the plot and the world building are all impeccable. Despite the weakness of the following two books, the concept of a couture virus was enough to catch and carry me through the series. These books are sexual, violent, and terribly glamorous.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

So far I've only read Dead Girls. It was great, even though the first time I read it I did not know a lot of the foreign words. I have never been a fan of Sci-fi, but this one kept my attention.

[Jim]

Sounds....different!

I'd love to read it if I could just find it! lol

[Edward Rathke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant trilogy. Fearless and compelling and just full of chaotic awesomeness.

My full review at The Lit Pub.