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SwitchFlipped
SwitchFlipped is a fast-paced, gritty urban fantasy novel set in the cracks behind what we think of as reality.
The love of Jasper’s life has been a missing person for the last five years, so he’s completely dumb-founded when she wakes him up in the middle of the night and drags him to bed. Twenty-four wild hours later she’s gone again, as suddenly as she appeared, without so much as a hint of explanation. Jasper is left without answers, without hope, and without any idea what to do about his current girlfriend.
The only clue that Jasper has is a peculiar word, accidentally “Switchflipped.” Compelled to go digging for answers, he is slowly drawn deeper and deeper into the occult underground. Reality, it turns out, is a lot less real than he’d imagined. Jasper finds himself sinking into a lunatic world where people can turn into electricity, where the undead live suburban lives, and where nothing is impossible if you’re prepared to pay the price.
Thrown into a vicious fight that he didn’t seek and doesn’t even really understand, Jasper has to look deep into himself to uncover his true nature. When your contemporaries include a woman who’s also a building, a miracle-working saint, and one of the secret monarchs of American automobiles, the choice between love and power is harder than ever.
The love of Jasper’s life has been a missing person for the last five years, so he’s completely dumb-founded when she wakes him up in the middle of the night and drags him to bed. Twenty-four wild hours later she’s gone again, as suddenly as she appeared, without so much as a hint of explanation. Jasper is left without answers, without hope, and without any idea what to do about his current girlfriend.
The only clue that Jasper has is a peculiar word, accidentally “Switchflipped.” Compelled to go digging for answers, he is slowly drawn deeper and deeper into the occult underground. Reality, it turns out, is a lot less real than he’d imagined. Jasper finds himself sinking into a lunatic world where people can turn into electricity, where the undead live suburban lives, and where nothing is impossible if you’re prepared to pay the price.
Thrown into a vicious fight that he didn’t seek and doesn’t even really understand, Jasper has to look deep into himself to uncover his true nature. When your contemporaries include a woman who’s also a building, a miracle-working saint, and one of the secret monarchs of American automobiles, the choice between love and power is harder than ever.
- GenresUrban FantasyFiction
ebook
First published July 29, 2011
2 people are currently reading
34 people want to read
About the author
Greg Stolze
146 books58 followersGreg Stolze (born 1970) is an American novelist and writer, whose work has mainly focused on properties derived from role-playing games.
Stolze has contributed to numerous role-playing game books for White Wolf Game Studio and Atlas Games, including Demon: the Fallen. Some of Stolze's recent work has been self-published using the "ransom method", whereby the game is only released when enough potential buyers have contributed enough money to reach a threshold set by the author.
Together with John Tynes he created and wrote the role-playing game Unknown Armies, published by Atlas Games. He has also co-written the free game NEMESIS, which uses the One-Roll Engine presented in Godlike and the so called Madness Meter derived from Unknown Armies.
Stolze has contributed to numerous role-playing game books for White Wolf Game Studio and Atlas Games, including Demon: the Fallen. Some of Stolze's recent work has been self-published using the "ransom method", whereby the game is only released when enough potential buyers have contributed enough money to reach a threshold set by the author.
Together with John Tynes he created and wrote the role-playing game Unknown Armies, published by Atlas Games. He has also co-written the free game NEMESIS, which uses the One-Roll Engine presented in Godlike and the so called Madness Meter derived from Unknown Armies.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 7, 2011
I didn't know anything about this book before I started reading it. I didn't know what it meant to be switchflipped, like the book's protagonist, Jasper. I think this added to my enjoyment, so I'm not going to tell you what it means either. Part of the draw in the early parts of the book is Jasper's quest to find out what switchflipped is. The book starts off with a bang, not the kind you might think. There were so many times when I had to stop and admire the skill that went into the writing of this book. I know, I know. You're not supposed to notice the skill of the writer, but I can't help it. As a writer, I take stories apart to see what makes them work. This book is a lesson in how to write good dialogue and how to intercut actions with dialogue. It's seamless. Also, Stolze does a great job of describing things that could never happen in real life in a way that made me completely understand them.
If I have to say something critical about the book , it's that I was disappointed not to find out in the end what happened to Jane. Not that the author gave us any hope that she was going to turn up again, but somehow I still hoped she would.
This book is reminiscent of American Gods or The Anansi Boys, only these are regular people who have become something else. It feels empowering.
If I have to say something critical about the book , it's that I was disappointed not to find out in the end what happened to Jane. Not that the author gave us any hope that she was going to turn up again, but somehow I still hoped she would.
This book is reminiscent of American Gods or The Anansi Boys, only these are regular people who have become something else. It feels empowering.
June 20, 2012
Greg Stolze developed a deserved reputation over the last decade as one of the most inventive, creative and balls-out talented writers in the roleplaying game industry. Like many other RPG writers he’s now largely left that business behind, but gaming’s loss is urban fantasy fiction’s gain, because now we have SwitchFlipped. This ensemble novel follows a host of characters, both normal and anything but, as they weave and blunder through secrets world and bizarre agendas.
It all starts with Jasper, a regular guy whose long-lost fiancée Jane reappears for one night and then vanishes again, leaving behind a re-broken heart and the word 'switchflipped'. Jasper's quest to find out what that means and learn what happened to Jane drags him into the world of bizarre people like Kung-Fu Joe and the Thunder Saint, of ancient witches and mad electricity worshippers, of the royal family of automobiles and a man who eats burning light. Into the world of the Switchflipped, who inhabit 'the world of thunder and shadow'. But as weird as these people are, they're still very normal and very human, and when Jasper blunders in he throws their world out of whack, and that upset soon leads to battles, alliances and terrible deaths.
Stolze has once again created a consistent metaphysic that moves away from the now-traditional (and tired) wizards and fey and werewolves of most urban fantasy to create an original mashup of fantasy, horror, low-level superheroics and high weirdness. The Switchflipped follow the principles of force without form and form without force, and they gain powers and abilities (and limitations) by making themselves more or less real than the concepts that they try to emulate. But they're not the only weird people in the world, and we get glimpses of other, even stranger beings and principles. It's to Stolze's credit that he sketches his world and its concepts without too much exposition, largely by developing a host of interesting characters, each with a distinct style and voice, that we can follow and observe as they move through that world.
SwitchFlipped is good but not perfect, and it has a few flaws (including some formatting hiccups in the Kindle version). In a book so sprawling and with its focus so spread amongst its characters, it’s no surprise that some plot threads don’t wrap up cleanly or 100% satisfyingly. Nor it is a surprise, given Stolze’s desire to ground the surreal and fantastic in the everyday, that the ending is somewhat anticlimactic.
But that grounding is also the book’s greatest strength, because it pulls the story apart from every other urban fantasy story out there and gives far more substance and depth to the characters. Everyone has a reason for being who they are, everyone has moral strengths and weaknesses; there are no heroes and villains here, just people. Weird, weird fucking people, wrapped up in their weird fucking lives, expressed through weird fucking prose.
SwitchFlipped is good shit. It's like five goddamn bucks. You should read it.
It all starts with Jasper, a regular guy whose long-lost fiancée Jane reappears for one night and then vanishes again, leaving behind a re-broken heart and the word 'switchflipped'. Jasper's quest to find out what that means and learn what happened to Jane drags him into the world of bizarre people like Kung-Fu Joe and the Thunder Saint, of ancient witches and mad electricity worshippers, of the royal family of automobiles and a man who eats burning light. Into the world of the Switchflipped, who inhabit 'the world of thunder and shadow'. But as weird as these people are, they're still very normal and very human, and when Jasper blunders in he throws their world out of whack, and that upset soon leads to battles, alliances and terrible deaths.
Stolze has once again created a consistent metaphysic that moves away from the now-traditional (and tired) wizards and fey and werewolves of most urban fantasy to create an original mashup of fantasy, horror, low-level superheroics and high weirdness. The Switchflipped follow the principles of force without form and form without force, and they gain powers and abilities (and limitations) by making themselves more or less real than the concepts that they try to emulate. But they're not the only weird people in the world, and we get glimpses of other, even stranger beings and principles. It's to Stolze's credit that he sketches his world and its concepts without too much exposition, largely by developing a host of interesting characters, each with a distinct style and voice, that we can follow and observe as they move through that world.
SwitchFlipped is good but not perfect, and it has a few flaws (including some formatting hiccups in the Kindle version). In a book so sprawling and with its focus so spread amongst its characters, it’s no surprise that some plot threads don’t wrap up cleanly or 100% satisfyingly. Nor it is a surprise, given Stolze’s desire to ground the surreal and fantastic in the everyday, that the ending is somewhat anticlimactic.
But that grounding is also the book’s greatest strength, because it pulls the story apart from every other urban fantasy story out there and gives far more substance and depth to the characters. Everyone has a reason for being who they are, everyone has moral strengths and weaknesses; there are no heroes and villains here, just people. Weird, weird fucking people, wrapped up in their weird fucking lives, expressed through weird fucking prose.
SwitchFlipped is good shit. It's like five goddamn bucks. You should read it.
January 19, 2022
Like other readers, I first became aware of Stolze and his work via Unknown Armies. Its particular flavor of existentialist horror grabbed me in ways it isn't polite to mention in public and never really let go.
While SwitchFlipped isn't UA, it's clearly a kissing a cousin. It doesn't fall into the tropey traps of Urban Fantasy; there aren't any orderly secret societies of wizards, vampires, and everything but the kitchen sink. Most of the magic in SwitchFlipped is dirty, personal, and you always, always pay a price for it.
SwitchFlipped is about broken people, misunderstandings, and the price we're willing to pay to get what we want. It's also a love story. With explosions.
I do have a bone to pick with it, however. Sure, it's mentioned in all of a paragraph or so, and the exposition on slave morality isn't bad for the couple sentences it gets. Those sentences also paint Friedrich Nietzsche as an anti-semite. There are definitely some ills we can lay at his door, including some frothing misogyny, but hating Jews isn't really one of them; he frequently unfavorably compared German culture to Jewish, basically told Germans to have sex with Jews if they didn't want their culture to die out, and threatened to disown his sister if she didn't divorce her husband over his anti-Semitic views. Unfortunately for Freddy Neech, he spent the last decade of his life catatonic (syphilis has been a popular rumor, but we don't actually know why). A couple of friends refused to respect his wishes and burn his remaining works - said works, and said catatonic Fred, came into the care of his sister. The same sister who not only didn't one object to her husband's views, but rabidly shared them. It's the sister who was behind the mess that is Will to Power, and who introduced the early Nazi party to a very bastardized version of her brother's work.
While SwitchFlipped isn't UA, it's clearly a kissing a cousin. It doesn't fall into the tropey traps of Urban Fantasy; there aren't any orderly secret societies of wizards, vampires, and everything but the kitchen sink. Most of the magic in SwitchFlipped is dirty, personal, and you always, always pay a price for it.
SwitchFlipped is about broken people, misunderstandings, and the price we're willing to pay to get what we want. It's also a love story. With explosions.
I do have a bone to pick with it, however. Sure, it's mentioned in all of a paragraph or so, and the exposition on slave morality isn't bad for the couple sentences it gets. Those sentences also paint Friedrich Nietzsche as an anti-semite. There are definitely some ills we can lay at his door, including some frothing misogyny, but hating Jews isn't really one of them; he frequently unfavorably compared German culture to Jewish, basically told Germans to have sex with Jews if they didn't want their culture to die out, and threatened to disown his sister if she didn't divorce her husband over his anti-Semitic views. Unfortunately for Freddy Neech, he spent the last decade of his life catatonic (syphilis has been a popular rumor, but we don't actually know why). A couple of friends refused to respect his wishes and burn his remaining works - said works, and said catatonic Fred, came into the care of his sister. The same sister who not only didn't one object to her husband's views, but rabidly shared them. It's the sister who was behind the mess that is Will to Power, and who introduced the early Nazi party to a very bastardized version of her brother's work.
October 4, 2012
I really, really wanted to like this book.
I've loved Greg Stolze's writing style ever since discovering UNKNOWN ARMIES, and I've followed him through several successive game books (WILD TALENTS, REIGN). So I was stoked to pick up one of his works of fiction, especially since it looked similar (though clearly not identical) to the UNKNOWN ARMIES milieu. And the setting itself is interesting: seedy loners adopting the power of "totems" and operating in an occult underground.
But the writing style did not work for me at all.
Stolze's "mundane" characters - the people who don't already operate in the occult underground, but are swept up in the chaos - all speak in the same hyper-literate, hyper-literal spray. There's more than one scene where characters are having an emotional exchange of dialogue, only to interrupt each other and correct each other's pop cultural references. It's a jarring contrast in tone and it dragged me out of the scene every time I read it, preventing me from caring about the characters.
Not that there's a lot of work invested in making me care about the characters anyway. There's Jasper, whose long-lost girlfriend reappears one night and ambushes him for hot sex. That's interesting enough to keep me reading, but I never really felt invested in Jasper's struggles. And I hesitate to call him "the protagonist," because we spend just as much time with other characters already enmeshed in the occult underground, like Kung Fu Pete and the Thunder Saint. They're also interesting, but the character development with them is all set-up with no payoff. (For instance, we get a lengthy backstory on Kung Fu Pete and the source of his powers right at the climax of the book, grinding the action to a halt)
The narrative need to enmesh all these characters in each other's lives leads to odd behavior. There's a scene late in the book where a character tries to confront Jasper and fails. Rather than pursuing Jasper, whom she notionally cares about, she drops what she's doing to go take a self-defense lesson ... with Kung Fu Pete, naturally. One of the book's villains stumbles into a bar where a violent confrontation between a dead, banshee-like spirit and another magic-user nearly rip the place to shreds. In the next scene, he's going about his business as if nothing happened, with only an offhand comment about the fight he witnessed.
And none of this is helped by Stolze's tendency to keep the setting elements on tenterhooks until late in the story, so as to keep the readers in the dark. "Did you hear about the witch?" people ask. "Yeah. Did someone take her domain?" We don't learn who the witch is, or what a domain signifies, until long after we've stopped caring. I respect the desire to minimize exposition, but not at the cost of the reader's attention.
Still better than STORM FRONT.
I've loved Greg Stolze's writing style ever since discovering UNKNOWN ARMIES, and I've followed him through several successive game books (WILD TALENTS, REIGN). So I was stoked to pick up one of his works of fiction, especially since it looked similar (though clearly not identical) to the UNKNOWN ARMIES milieu. And the setting itself is interesting: seedy loners adopting the power of "totems" and operating in an occult underground.
But the writing style did not work for me at all.
Stolze's "mundane" characters - the people who don't already operate in the occult underground, but are swept up in the chaos - all speak in the same hyper-literate, hyper-literal spray. There's more than one scene where characters are having an emotional exchange of dialogue, only to interrupt each other and correct each other's pop cultural references. It's a jarring contrast in tone and it dragged me out of the scene every time I read it, preventing me from caring about the characters.
Not that there's a lot of work invested in making me care about the characters anyway. There's Jasper, whose long-lost girlfriend reappears one night and ambushes him for hot sex. That's interesting enough to keep me reading, but I never really felt invested in Jasper's struggles. And I hesitate to call him "the protagonist," because we spend just as much time with other characters already enmeshed in the occult underground, like Kung Fu Pete and the Thunder Saint. They're also interesting, but the character development with them is all set-up with no payoff. (For instance, we get a lengthy backstory on Kung Fu Pete and the source of his powers right at the climax of the book, grinding the action to a halt)
The narrative need to enmesh all these characters in each other's lives leads to odd behavior. There's a scene late in the book where a character tries to confront Jasper and fails. Rather than pursuing Jasper, whom she notionally cares about, she drops what she's doing to go take a self-defense lesson ... with Kung Fu Pete, naturally. One of the book's villains stumbles into a bar where a violent confrontation between a dead, banshee-like spirit and another magic-user nearly rip the place to shreds. In the next scene, he's going about his business as if nothing happened, with only an offhand comment about the fight he witnessed.
And none of this is helped by Stolze's tendency to keep the setting elements on tenterhooks until late in the story, so as to keep the readers in the dark. "Did you hear about the witch?" people ask. "Yeah. Did someone take her domain?" We don't learn who the witch is, or what a domain signifies, until long after we've stopped caring. I respect the desire to minimize exposition, but not at the cost of the reader's attention.
Still better than STORM FRONT.
July 23, 2013
I really enjoyed Stolze's latest title, SINNER, so I thought I'd try this one. And I'm glad I did!
SWITCHEFLIPPED is similar to SINNER in some ways. It’s told in the first person, and though it’s not exactly a superhero book, in a way it is, and if you like superhero stories you might want to give this one a try.
In SWITCHEFLIPPED, various people embody specific concepts. There is someone who embodies the concept of The Evil Witch, for example (She gets murdered early on, which is great, because, hey, Evil Witch), and someone who seems to possibly embody, I don’t know, the concept of a Mad Gadgeteer, maybe. And so forth.
The narrative actually starts when the fiancée of the primary main character, Jasper, reappears. She vanished five years ago, and now she reappears for one wild night, after which she leaves again, telling Jasper only that she couldn’t bear it if he got switchflipped because of her.
Pretty catchy, right?
Then the narrative switches among Jasper, his ex-fiancée (Jane), his current girlfriend (Vivian), a guy called Kung-Fu Pete (you can tell what concept he embodies, right?), and to a lesser extent half a dozen other characters. I think there are eleven characters who get at least a little pov time. So this is very different from Sinner obviously. It worked pretty well for me, because I liked Jasper, Jane, Vivian, and Pete. Here Stolze’s gift for characterization is crucial, because I would not ordinarily be very interested in this many different characters, but he made each of them come to life for me. I can think of more than one well-known author who bore me to tears when they break a narrative up like this, but in this one, as I say, it works.
Jasper’s basically an ordinary guy, Jane is an ordinary woman who got caught up in an extraordinary and rather creepy situation, Vivian is a WONDERFUL psychologist, and Kung-Fu Pete is my favorite character in the book – I like heroes, and I like them to be pragmatic when necessary, and I just loved Pete.
Though one major plot element gets resolved in this book, there is clearly supposed to be a sequel. I will definitely grab it when and if it appears, because I really am just dying to know how Jane’s creepy situation fits into the broader picture, and do she and Jasper manage to get back together, and does it wind up working out between Vivian and Jasper’s friend Dave? And I love the sort-of-superpower Jasper acquired and want to watch that work through a full book.
Let me just reiterate once more that the dialogue is really fun in this story. Here’s one of my favorite exchanges:
A friend to Vivian: “Is David the one you were trying to set me up with?”
Vivian: “I was not trying to set you up, and yes, he was.”
The friend: “You do realize that your last sentence completely hogtied logic and rational thought?”
Seriously, I lol.
SWITCHEFLIPPED is similar to SINNER in some ways. It’s told in the first person, and though it’s not exactly a superhero book, in a way it is, and if you like superhero stories you might want to give this one a try.
In SWITCHEFLIPPED, various people embody specific concepts. There is someone who embodies the concept of The Evil Witch, for example (She gets murdered early on, which is great, because, hey, Evil Witch), and someone who seems to possibly embody, I don’t know, the concept of a Mad Gadgeteer, maybe. And so forth.
The narrative actually starts when the fiancée of the primary main character, Jasper, reappears. She vanished five years ago, and now she reappears for one wild night, after which she leaves again, telling Jasper only that she couldn’t bear it if he got switchflipped because of her.
Pretty catchy, right?
Then the narrative switches among Jasper, his ex-fiancée (Jane), his current girlfriend (Vivian), a guy called Kung-Fu Pete (you can tell what concept he embodies, right?), and to a lesser extent half a dozen other characters. I think there are eleven characters who get at least a little pov time. So this is very different from Sinner obviously. It worked pretty well for me, because I liked Jasper, Jane, Vivian, and Pete. Here Stolze’s gift for characterization is crucial, because I would not ordinarily be very interested in this many different characters, but he made each of them come to life for me. I can think of more than one well-known author who bore me to tears when they break a narrative up like this, but in this one, as I say, it works.
Jasper’s basically an ordinary guy, Jane is an ordinary woman who got caught up in an extraordinary and rather creepy situation, Vivian is a WONDERFUL psychologist, and Kung-Fu Pete is my favorite character in the book – I like heroes, and I like them to be pragmatic when necessary, and I just loved Pete.
Though one major plot element gets resolved in this book, there is clearly supposed to be a sequel. I will definitely grab it when and if it appears, because I really am just dying to know how Jane’s creepy situation fits into the broader picture, and do she and Jasper manage to get back together, and does it wind up working out between Vivian and Jasper’s friend Dave? And I love the sort-of-superpower Jasper acquired and want to watch that work through a full book.
Let me just reiterate once more that the dialogue is really fun in this story. Here’s one of my favorite exchanges:
A friend to Vivian: “Is David the one you were trying to set me up with?”
Vivian: “I was not trying to set you up, and yes, he was.”
The friend: “You do realize that your last sentence completely hogtied logic and rational thought?”
Seriously, I lol.
February 2, 2012
I wish I could have given this book 4.5 stars. The plot is interesting, the writing grabs you and does not let go, but I would have preferred if the story had been told from one or at most two points of view. It is a minor quibble, but it kept me from giving the book 5 stars.
SwitchFlipped is about a group of people who have figured out how to control reality though the use of idioms, like "electric future" or "kung fu movies." They form a kind of underground community of enlightened wackos. When one of them dies, the hunt for the killer begins, and things turn ugly.
Stolze, as usual, does a great job presenting the weirdness of viewing the world through the warped lenses of idioms in an easily digestible manner. The prose is witty, the characters are mysterious but likable, and the story does not go where you expect it to. It was a very enjoyable read.
If you like stories about supernatural weirdness, personal discovery, or the subjective nature of reality, you will like this book.
SwitchFlipped is about a group of people who have figured out how to control reality though the use of idioms, like "electric future" or "kung fu movies." They form a kind of underground community of enlightened wackos. When one of them dies, the hunt for the killer begins, and things turn ugly.
Stolze, as usual, does a great job presenting the weirdness of viewing the world through the warped lenses of idioms in an easily digestible manner. The prose is witty, the characters are mysterious but likable, and the story does not go where you expect it to. It was a very enjoyable read.
If you like stories about supernatural weirdness, personal discovery, or the subjective nature of reality, you will like this book.
October 14, 2011
"A midnight knock on your door is never good," says Jasper Morgenstern, particularly when it's your longlost and presumed dead girlfriend, and PARTICULARLY when you proceed to have sex with her despite the fact that you're now with someone else. And when she suddenly leaves with no explanation for her absence other than a comment that she hopes Jasper doesn't get switchflipped, what's he to do but find out what that means?
The short chapters switch viewpoints often in this fantasy ground in the real world and it's to Stolze's credit that we feel some sympathy with virtually every character. While there are still some questions left open at the end (sequel?) it is also a satisfying glimpse into a world not too different from our own. The wry humor as well as the evolving and hard-to-grasp storyline kept me involved. Part film noir, part action, all good.
The short chapters switch viewpoints often in this fantasy ground in the real world and it's to Stolze's credit that we feel some sympathy with virtually every character. While there are still some questions left open at the end (sequel?) it is also a satisfying glimpse into a world not too different from our own. The wry humor as well as the evolving and hard-to-grasp storyline kept me involved. Part film noir, part action, all good.
August 16, 2011
I am quite admiring of Greg Stolze's works in other spheres, and whipped through this book in one sitting, but was left a bit unsatisfied by the plot's resolution - he very assuredly constructs a world, a cast of interesting characters and a nifty metaphysics, but events drew to a close sooner than I was expecting and I felt a little disappointed, and would quite merrily have read another 200 pages. He does a good job of writing dialogue that sounds like natural conversation, and in presenting the uncanny in a consistent fashion.
Hopefully, a sequel will present itself sooner or later.
Hopefully, a sequel will present itself sooner or later.
December 14, 2011
Belongs on the same shelf as Tim Powers, a good thing. Does not feature an alcoholic white male protagonist with father issues, also a good thing. Sudden ending that sets up a sequel, but this actually is appropriate within the context of the story.
January 25, 2014
Interesting book. Take a normal guy and throw in an odd experience, not enough to change his world, but enough to make him curious.
Interesting cast of supporting characters, including the ex.
Interesting cast of supporting characters, including the ex.
August 1, 2014
Entertaining read with an offbeat twist on the 'hidden reality' genre
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews