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The Night Mayor
Welcome to the City made from a dream. But this isn’t any dream; it is the dark and haunting nightmare of a killer.
It is the near future and old-fashioned movies, or “flatties”, have been replaced by Dreams, virtual reality scenarios written by professional Dreamers. When infamous criminal Truro Daine escapes imprisonment, he flees into the City, an artificial world of his own creation, where he rules as the all-powerful Night Mayor.
Now, detective Dreamer Tom Tunney and Susan Bishopric, author of romance Dreams, must join forces to track him down. But how do you hunt the Night Mayor in a city populated by a dense crowd of strangely familiar characters, where it’s always two-thirty in the morning, shots never kill and the creator is omnipresent in every drop of falling rain…?
It is the near future and old-fashioned movies, or “flatties”, have been replaced by Dreams, virtual reality scenarios written by professional Dreamers. When infamous criminal Truro Daine escapes imprisonment, he flees into the City, an artificial world of his own creation, where he rules as the all-powerful Night Mayor.
Now, detective Dreamer Tom Tunney and Susan Bishopric, author of romance Dreams, must join forces to track him down. But how do you hunt the Night Mayor in a city populated by a dense crowd of strangely familiar characters, where it’s always two-thirty in the morning, shots never kill and the creator is omnipresent in every drop of falling rain…?
265 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
5 people are currently reading
274 people want to read
About the author
Kim Newman
288 books949 followersNote: This author also writes under the pseudonym of Jack Yeovil.
An expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include Nightmare Movies and Millennium Movies), Kim Newman's novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. He is complexly and irreverently referential; the Dracula sequence--Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula,Cha Cha Cha--not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany's air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith.
In horror novels such as Bad Dreams and Jago, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche--perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel Drachenfels which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel.
Life's Lottery, his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero's fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality.
An expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include Nightmare Movies and Millennium Movies), Kim Newman's novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. He is complexly and irreverently referential; the Dracula sequence--Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula,Cha Cha Cha--not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany's air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith.
In horror novels such as Bad Dreams and Jago, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche--perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel Drachenfels which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel.
Life's Lottery, his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero's fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
March 17, 2014
The Night Mayor takes the cyberpunk concepts of artificial realities powered by AI and ghosts in the machine and inserts a real and obvious passion for classic films noir to give us a fun cyber-noir novel.
Two "Dreamers" responsible for creating interactive Dream experiences are press ganged by the British government to enter the dreamscape of a dangerous criminal and change the world around him to such an extent that he is forced back in to the real world. Only in this Dream he is an all powerful god, and in reality he was obsessed with old "flatties" from the classic Hollywood film noir period, the combination providing room for Lee Marvin, Claude Rains, Edward G. Robinson, Peter Lorre et al to once more skulk around those dark brooding streets of a city where it's perpetually 230am and raining.
It's a fun adventure story that is at its best when utilising the traditional hardboiled narrative approach and loses its way a little in the mirrorshades world of what in this instance can only be considered cyberpunk-lite. There's a lot of imagination involved from Newman and some real skill to make what could have been a terribly gimmicky concept in to a genuine serious novel that utilises that gimmick to great effect. This makes spotting the references to all of your favourite noirs that much more fun rather the eye rolling and groaning that you might otherwise expect from other more jokey novels.
If, like me, you're a fan of both of these genres and classic film noir, The Night Mayor is a book that should definitely find its way in to your collection.
Two "Dreamers" responsible for creating interactive Dream experiences are press ganged by the British government to enter the dreamscape of a dangerous criminal and change the world around him to such an extent that he is forced back in to the real world. Only in this Dream he is an all powerful god, and in reality he was obsessed with old "flatties" from the classic Hollywood film noir period, the combination providing room for Lee Marvin, Claude Rains, Edward G. Robinson, Peter Lorre et al to once more skulk around those dark brooding streets of a city where it's perpetually 230am and raining.
It's a fun adventure story that is at its best when utilising the traditional hardboiled narrative approach and loses its way a little in the mirrorshades world of what in this instance can only be considered cyberpunk-lite. There's a lot of imagination involved from Newman and some real skill to make what could have been a terribly gimmicky concept in to a genuine serious novel that utilises that gimmick to great effect. This makes spotting the references to all of your favourite noirs that much more fun rather the eye rolling and groaning that you might otherwise expect from other more jokey novels.
If, like me, you're a fan of both of these genres and classic film noir, The Night Mayor is a book that should definitely find its way in to your collection.
October 28, 2025
This was an interesting read. The author really just jumped right in with minimal initial explanations of the world building. I expected a bit more character building, but that was not the focus of the main story or the subsequent short stories.
June 7, 2025
This is my first time reading Kim Newman outside of his articles for Empire. I’d been meaning to try out his Anno Dracula novels, but this was the first of his books I managed to come across – and it also happens to be his first novel, so I guess it’s kind of an appropriate place to start. And based on this evidence, Newman decided to start off with a fully weird take on virtual-reality cyberpunk based entirely on noir films, where everything is black-and-white and it’s always 2:30 in the morning and raining.
In this alternate future, VR (a.k.a. “dreaming”) has replaced films as entertainment and runs on Yggdrasil, a sentient AI that runs a global computer. Professional Dreamers create VR narratives in Yggdrasil, but master criminal Truro Daine has used this to “escape” from prison into his own virtual world based on 50s noir films and established himself there as The Night Mayor – which might not be an issue except he’s expanding his world with the aim of taking over Yggdrasil completely. The govt sends in pro Dreamer Tom Tunney (a.k.a. Richie Quick, 50s noir private eye) to kill Daine inside his VR world, but when Tunney loses his grip on reality, it’s up to pro romance Dreamer Susan Bishopric to save the day.
Like I say, it’s an unusual take on cyberpunk, with Newman making the most of his encyclopaedic knowledge of noir films to the point that all of the supporting characters are named as the actors typecast in those roles (Ralph Bellamy, Dan Duryea, Mike Mazurki, Otto Kruger, John Carradine, etc), which if nothing else is a treat for film nerds like me. And while Newman avoids the technological specifics (wisely or otherwise), he does have some fun with the possibilities of tracking down an omnipotent criminal in a malleable virtual world where you can, say, throw Godzilla in there if you really want to. His Chandler-esque patter ain’t bad, either.
In this alternate future, VR (a.k.a. “dreaming”) has replaced films as entertainment and runs on Yggdrasil, a sentient AI that runs a global computer. Professional Dreamers create VR narratives in Yggdrasil, but master criminal Truro Daine has used this to “escape” from prison into his own virtual world based on 50s noir films and established himself there as The Night Mayor – which might not be an issue except he’s expanding his world with the aim of taking over Yggdrasil completely. The govt sends in pro Dreamer Tom Tunney (a.k.a. Richie Quick, 50s noir private eye) to kill Daine inside his VR world, but when Tunney loses his grip on reality, it’s up to pro romance Dreamer Susan Bishopric to save the day.
Like I say, it’s an unusual take on cyberpunk, with Newman making the most of his encyclopaedic knowledge of noir films to the point that all of the supporting characters are named as the actors typecast in those roles (Ralph Bellamy, Dan Duryea, Mike Mazurki, Otto Kruger, John Carradine, etc), which if nothing else is a treat for film nerds like me. And while Newman avoids the technological specifics (wisely or otherwise), he does have some fun with the possibilities of tracking down an omnipotent criminal in a malleable virtual world where you can, say, throw Godzilla in there if you really want to. His Chandler-esque patter ain’t bad, either.
October 24, 2014
In our opinion, this note of confusion is at the very heart of the oneiric quality specific to the series.
- Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir
‘All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream…’ Who said that? Edgar Allan Poe? Or Vincent Price?
- The Night Mayor
This novel should delight all devotees of film noir. The plot concerns a manhunt for a killer who has escaped into The City, the fugitive’s self-constructed virtual reality based on films noir, or “flatties” as they’re referred to in the futuristic milieu of the novel. The characters experience not just the mise en scène of the films, but their actual narrative techniques, as they fade out and fade in to travel from one place or another, or hear the sourceless moody jazz that accompanies their nocturnal walks. Newman throws out references to more films and actors than I suspect all but the most obsessive fan could catch, I’m sure I missed many but did catch a large number such as mentions in passing of an address of 99 River Street, or a restaurant named Mildred’s. Appearing in typical characterizations but under their own names are many B-list stars and character actors that are the glory of the genre, such as Dan Duryea, Gloria Grahame, Thelma Ritter, and, of course, Elisha Cook, Jr.
The sf content is very derivative of Philip K. Dick, particularly Ubik, with some scenes of high weirdness as characters attempt to re-shape the dream world in which they find themselves. But Newman does not share PKD’s deep-seated ambivalence about reality and while such scenes may bend the character’s minds, they never threaten to warp the reader’s orientation. There are also a few alternate history hints thrown out early in the novel which are never developed and add nothing that I could see to the story’s meaning. The real strength of the book is in the scenes, more than half of the total, which take place in The City, and which read something like Finnegans Wake re-written by Eddie Muller:
- Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir
‘All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream…’ Who said that? Edgar Allan Poe? Or Vincent Price?
- The Night Mayor
This novel should delight all devotees of film noir. The plot concerns a manhunt for a killer who has escaped into The City, the fugitive’s self-constructed virtual reality based on films noir, or “flatties” as they’re referred to in the futuristic milieu of the novel. The characters experience not just the mise en scène of the films, but their actual narrative techniques, as they fade out and fade in to travel from one place or another, or hear the sourceless moody jazz that accompanies their nocturnal walks. Newman throws out references to more films and actors than I suspect all but the most obsessive fan could catch, I’m sure I missed many but did catch a large number such as mentions in passing of an address of 99 River Street, or a restaurant named Mildred’s. Appearing in typical characterizations but under their own names are many B-list stars and character actors that are the glory of the genre, such as Dan Duryea, Gloria Grahame, Thelma Ritter, and, of course, Elisha Cook, Jr.
The sf content is very derivative of Philip K. Dick, particularly Ubik, with some scenes of high weirdness as characters attempt to re-shape the dream world in which they find themselves. But Newman does not share PKD’s deep-seated ambivalence about reality and while such scenes may bend the character’s minds, they never threaten to warp the reader’s orientation. There are also a few alternate history hints thrown out early in the novel which are never developed and add nothing that I could see to the story’s meaning. The real strength of the book is in the scenes, more than half of the total, which take place in The City, and which read something like Finnegans Wake re-written by Eddie Muller:
We had faded in on Poverty Row. I had been in town long enough to know the place. It was the worst slum in the City, far from the swish Metro and Paramount districts. Jerry-built tenements cramped together, as convincing as cardboard flats. Every hotel room had an irritating sign flashing outside the window. Every alley had a mangy black cat set to cringe in a flashlight beam. When a door got slammed, the walls shook. There weren’t many people on the streets at any time of the day. Extras cost money. This was the world of peeling paint, tap-dancing cockroaches and the constant shadow of the boom mike. On Poverty Row, life had a low budget and a short running-time.
December 29, 2018
A curious artefact. Written before the internet reduced film buffery to a matter of possessing opposable thumbs, this light novel is essentially a relentless torrent of film noir references. The central conceit, suspiciously similar to the Star Trek episodes A Piece of the Action and The Big Goodbye (which aired a year or two before Night Mayor's publication), features an inception-like dream raid in which a couple of cyberpunks attempt to bring down a super criminal in a black and white, always raining, dreamscape. It's amusingly written, and contains a decent number of neat ideas, but nothing is inspected deeply and the main purpose of the book seems to demonstrate Newman's encyclopaedic cineaste credentials. That's a shame, because to me it's at its best when he's inventing rather than pastiching. As a final thought, most of the films he adores were already fading into obscurity in 1990, and I suspect that to a young modern audience, most of the references would be meaningless. I enjoyed it, but I don't think it could possibly get published today.
July 6, 2016
DNF. Not my cup of tea at all, but fans of film noir, Sam Spade, and the like will probably enjoy this offbeat book about a detective searching for a killer in a world populated by movie characters reliving scenes from their movies.
May 18, 2024
I first read this book on the Irish ferry taking me to Wales for a slightly traumatising summer working as a waiter in a Butlin's holiday camp in the early 90s. It wasn't all bad - it was the summer of an absolutely debilitating London-melting heatwave, and you could hike u to a fairly nice dune-lined beach and watch a pod of dolphins splash around in the distance. Also the fudge was exceptional Still, it wasn't until I read Anno Dracula that I suddenly became a Newman fan, and in all the fuss and bother and angst this kind of passed me by.
I read a Tom Clancy that summer, too. Clear And Present Danger maybe? Clancy could write fairly riveting international techno-thrillers, but it probably helped that I was extremely callow and ignorant of international politics but it was good and chunky and not very challengingI reread some Douglas Adams, too, and that was when the phrase 'Eddie's in the time stream' started echoing in my brain as I wandered through the mazes of bright yellow chalets wondering what to do about getting showers in the swimming pool now thay my towel had been stolen. I also finally, finally got my hands on the collected V For Vendetta, the culmination of years of obsession after finding a few issues of Warrior inexplicably in some department store in Limerick, and I read most of it in the dunes in bright sunshine while dolphins frolicked in the bay. Anyway.
Of course this anticipates the world of Anno Dracula with its setting of a world where every film noir ever made co-exists side by sde in a city where it's always 2.30am and it's always raining. It's a virtual world - this is cyberpunk! - created by a master villain using it as an escape from prison and a means of subverting and taking over the benign AI that runs the world, Yggdrasil. Two Dreamers - artists adept at creating stories and settings in such environments - are sent in after him, the second after the first gets completely absorbed by his noir Humphrey Bogart-esque persona. Whatever else about the book, I never forgot the discussion about which female persona the second Dreamer should adopt, all the standard female characters being too useless or meeting grisly ends that would be forced on her by the conventions and rules of noir that prevailed in the City. Newman as never been unaware of the limitations of the fictions he clearly loves. I'd forgotten the truly ghastly bit where a black character turns up, just in case you thought women had it bad in the genre.
The battle for supremacy in the City commences, through plots and settings and involving characters from decades of black and white crime films all jostling around in the background when they're not getting in everyobody's way, and occasional intrusions from other genres as characters try to change the rules and assert control. There's even a terrific inevitable car chase before the climax and a twist reveal. It's really great and I enjoyed revising it, traumatic associations and all. The audio book I listened to includes four extra short stories, two of them from the same setting, though they'll probably be familiar to regular Newman readers.
I read a Tom Clancy that summer, too. Clear And Present Danger maybe? Clancy could write fairly riveting international techno-thrillers, but it probably helped that I was extremely callow and ignorant of international politics but it was good and chunky and not very challengingI reread some Douglas Adams, too, and that was when the phrase 'Eddie's in the time stream' started echoing in my brain as I wandered through the mazes of bright yellow chalets wondering what to do about getting showers in the swimming pool now thay my towel had been stolen. I also finally, finally got my hands on the collected V For Vendetta, the culmination of years of obsession after finding a few issues of Warrior inexplicably in some department store in Limerick, and I read most of it in the dunes in bright sunshine while dolphins frolicked in the bay. Anyway.
Of course this anticipates the world of Anno Dracula with its setting of a world where every film noir ever made co-exists side by sde in a city where it's always 2.30am and it's always raining. It's a virtual world - this is cyberpunk! - created by a master villain using it as an escape from prison and a means of subverting and taking over the benign AI that runs the world, Yggdrasil. Two Dreamers - artists adept at creating stories and settings in such environments - are sent in after him, the second after the first gets completely absorbed by his noir Humphrey Bogart-esque persona. Whatever else about the book, I never forgot the discussion about which female persona the second Dreamer should adopt, all the standard female characters being too useless or meeting grisly ends that would be forced on her by the conventions and rules of noir that prevailed in the City. Newman as never been unaware of the limitations of the fictions he clearly loves. I'd forgotten the truly ghastly bit where a black character turns up, just in case you thought women had it bad in the genre.
The battle for supremacy in the City commences, through plots and settings and involving characters from decades of black and white crime films all jostling around in the background when they're not getting in everyobody's way, and occasional intrusions from other genres as characters try to change the rules and assert control. There's even a terrific inevitable car chase before the climax and a twist reveal. It's really great and I enjoyed revising it, traumatic associations and all. The audio book I listened to includes four extra short stories, two of them from the same setting, though they'll probably be familiar to regular Newman readers.
June 19, 2022
I really enjoyed this. Erudite in all the right ways, it's an intelligent Slaves of the Volcano God, equal parts Trancers, Neuromancer, Raymond Chandler and that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where they get stuck in the Private Eye Holodeck program, or to name some media that came out after its publication date: The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, Lawnmower Man, hell even Scum of the Earth . A novel that will have you flipping through your copy of Who is That? The Late Late Viewer's Guide to the Old Old Movie Players .
It's a book of atmosphere. Almost every line is a poetry, slipping seamlessly from parody to homage:
"A few yards down the bar, Ray Millard was trying to exchange a typewriter for a bottle... Sam the barman dug out a pint and gave Millard a couple of adding machines in change...
...All over the City, people were killing each other, having torrid affairs in seedy motel rooms, stealing bodies from the morgue, working late on revolutionary inventions, hiding out from the cops, waiting for the locksmith, running numbers, rock 'n' rolling at the high-school hop, praying at the bedsides of white-haired mothers, looking for the uranium in the wine cellar, describing their dreams to sage psychoanalysts, rehearsing for the big show, escaping across the rooftops. It was crazy.
'All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.' Now, I could remember who said that. That was hard-bitten, hard-nosed, hard-drinking newshound Edgar Allan Poe." (150).
The "scifi lingo speak" chapters are at first distracting, and I don't think really necessary. And a virtuosic feat this clever is bound to end in a whimper, and so it does. I also do wish that something was being said, that this all lead up to something for the reader to take away other than a clever, rip-roaring good time. But I guess that might be a built-in flaw of the genre noir : much style over substance.
It's a book of atmosphere. Almost every line is a poetry, slipping seamlessly from parody to homage:
"A few yards down the bar, Ray Millard was trying to exchange a typewriter for a bottle... Sam the barman dug out a pint and gave Millard a couple of adding machines in change...
...All over the City, people were killing each other, having torrid affairs in seedy motel rooms, stealing bodies from the morgue, working late on revolutionary inventions, hiding out from the cops, waiting for the locksmith, running numbers, rock 'n' rolling at the high-school hop, praying at the bedsides of white-haired mothers, looking for the uranium in the wine cellar, describing their dreams to sage psychoanalysts, rehearsing for the big show, escaping across the rooftops. It was crazy.
'All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.' Now, I could remember who said that. That was hard-bitten, hard-nosed, hard-drinking newshound Edgar Allan Poe." (150).
The "scifi lingo speak" chapters are at first distracting, and I don't think really necessary. And a virtuosic feat this clever is bound to end in a whimper, and so it does. I also do wish that something was being said, that this all lead up to something for the reader to take away other than a clever, rip-roaring good time. But I guess that might be a built-in flaw of the genre noir : much style over substance.
August 24, 2025
j’ai trop aimé cette lecture que j’ai fini en quelques jours en vacances et ça m’a donné envie de lire davantage de sf. je l’ai trouvé dans une bouquinerie de sarlat. j’avais tout de suite accroché à ce plot de rêveurs dans un univers de films noirs qui vont combattre un grand méchant. toutes les références étaient hyper funs et le thème de l’intelligence artificielle assez novateur pour l’époque. je dirai même que pour comprendre l’époque dans laquelle on vit, on devrait lire plus de livres de ce genre parce-qu’on vit littéralement dans ces univers imaginées il y a 30-40 ans. j’étais hyper étonnée du ton du livre, c’était drôle et subtil, ainsi que son aspect féministe intelligent. j’étais parfois un peu perdue puisque les concepts évoqués sont expliqués au fur et à mesure, et l’auteur des dialogues était parfois confus. mais je recommande à tout le monde cette lecture !
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January 27, 2023This book had an amazing premise. A world created by a criminal who has the ability to dream this world to life. Interspersed with references from film-noir moviesand books it had my interst peaked. I was excited to read it. I lost interest quickly when the author threw in technical jargon that I felt didn't lend a hand to the story. I stopped reading when the female protagonist lost herself to the dream. I no longer had any interest in how it ended.
The book isn't very long and the story seemed to move quickly but I couldn't stay with it.
The book isn't very long and the story seemed to move quickly but I couldn't stay with it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 21, 2018
Newman's first novel about a dangerous virtual reality world filled with film noir trappings and characters, and clever observations about them, is awfully entertaining. The time spent in The City (where it's always 2:30 in the morning, dramatically shadowed, and raining) was more enjoyable to me than the time spent in the very 'cyberpunk 80s' future world with it's Dreamers, sentient computers, and government agents, but the whole thing moves at a good pace, has some great set pieces, and was a lot of fun.
June 14, 2020
Un roman dont l'idée de base, très intéressante, est gâchée par le manque d'informations sur l'univers et par des personnages peu convaincants. Je me suis posée beaucoup de questions, restées sans réponses, et j'ai aussi regretté que le méchant, Truro Daine, reste autant en retrait de l'histoire. C'est pourtant lui l'auteur de tout ce mic-mac !
https://lauryn-books.blogspot.com/202...
https://lauryn-books.blogspot.com/202...
September 4, 2025
This is a very unique cyberpunk novel about false reality and entering dreams. I like that Newman leans into the noir detective cliches in a meta way that really adds to the story. The beginning was very hard to get into because you have to learn and find out what the dreaming is and how it works. The additional stories at the end were also quite good.
September 10, 2018
This is a tough one to review.
The trouble with Kim Newman, for me, is that I love his topics/narratives/story lines, but somehow his writing just doesn't jell with me. The same happened with Life's Lottery and Anno Dracula...
3 stars, although I want to love it more.
The trouble with Kim Newman, for me, is that I love his topics/narratives/story lines, but somehow his writing just doesn't jell with me. The same happened with Life's Lottery and Anno Dracula...
3 stars, although I want to love it more.
March 28, 2023
This book does what it sets out to do really well! It’s a good story with classic noir elements but wonderfully surreal weirdness. I thought this was going to be a pretty pulpy, silly book, but it was very well-written for a debut novel and delightfully feminist.
January 12, 2019
Good story and entertaining enough. Pity about the spelling mistakes that a professional editor left in.
May 5, 2019
I mean, it was fine.
May 17, 2015
I'd been waiting for this story to hit Kindle for a while. The first handful of pages are the best interpretation of the old-fashioned detective noir milieu that I have read in a modern author. It was simply fantastic.
Then the story moved into the SciFi elements and I was for a few chapters until the author detailed the rules and concepts behind what I as reading. Once all the world rules and scope was established, it was game on again.
Written, in 1992, it wouldn't shock me if this story had had some influence on the movie Inception. There's a lot of genius involved in this story, and like seeming all genius, there's also a fair touch of madness. In a story set within a dream world constructed from a mishmash of old noir films, the reader must be prepared for the surreal dream mechanics that take place. That was, however, my least favourite part of the book. The author must have an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject matter as the story is a real tour de force of noir tropes and themes. Unfortunately, I fear most of the references are lost on my limited grasp of the genre!
Still, this was a cracking concept for a story and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
Then the story moved into the SciFi elements and I was for a few chapters until the author detailed the rules and concepts behind what I as reading. Once all the world rules and scope was established, it was game on again.
Written, in 1992, it wouldn't shock me if this story had had some influence on the movie Inception. There's a lot of genius involved in this story, and like seeming all genius, there's also a fair touch of madness. In a story set within a dream world constructed from a mishmash of old noir films, the reader must be prepared for the surreal dream mechanics that take place. That was, however, my least favourite part of the book. The author must have an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject matter as the story is a real tour de force of noir tropes and themes. Unfortunately, I fear most of the references are lost on my limited grasp of the genre!
Still, this was a cracking concept for a story and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
March 18, 2014
This was Kim's first work of fiction and it has some of the brillance of his later Anno Dracula series of which i am a big fan. It took me a few chapters to get into this & figure out what was going on but for a finish i did enjoy it even though i have no interest in film noir.I did recognise quite a few of the (real) names used but i am sure a lot of the references went over my head. The cyberpunk elements are pretty well done: entering a persons artifically created dream world & manipulating it, while there is also a bigger AI presence watching over all. As a side note, it's a very short book which you will get through in a couple of days.
August 2, 2015
The concept of this book is awesome. Professional Dreamers create dreams which the public can plug in to. But the plot is straight-forward detection, and because it happens in the realm of dream, Newman is given an easy way out. THe problem with working in a dreamscape is that the characters can produce what they need by thought--great as a concept, but not great for dramatic tension. The resolution was too easy, and while I enjoyed everything else, I felt a bit cheated at the end. Still, the ideas around it were fantastically creative, and if he could have come up with a less predictable plot, it would have been a 5-star read.
October 12, 2015
Cyberpunk as a genre owes a lot to film noir, or pulp/noir lit. Kim Newman does a great job of melding the two in a novella length story called The Night Mayor. A really well thought out sci fi concept in the noir backdrop of a noir film fan. At the end there are a few short stories set in the same world(s). They don't rate as well as the main story, but nonetheless entertaining. Great concept for a series perhaps, not limited to noir but any genre perhaps.
June 29, 2012
Very smart and sleek -- not his best, but it shows the genius that he'd show in the future ones. He clearly loves his topic of choice (old movies noir), and laces them together in a simple cyberpunk-ish novel set in an imaginary Noir city, where the entire fight happens inside the mind of a criminal.
If The Cell was actually a good movie and made sense, it'd be probably a lot like this book.
If The Cell was actually a good movie and made sense, it'd be probably a lot like this book.
August 20, 2015
I really like virtual reality sci-fi novels and this book was exactly the right kind. It's mysterious, clever, and it lets the reader wrap their mind around so many possibilities. Although, I felt that some points were particularly slow, it's a surprisingly quick read as the characters pull you into this crazy city with villains right out of 1950s gangster mob movies.
September 10, 2011
I really enjoyed this book. As a fan of the intersection of noir and SF, this book hit all my buttons. It helps to have a background in noir films, but I don't think it's required to enjoy this story with elements of virtual reality, advanced AIs and gat-toting hoods. A fun read.
January 18, 2013
A terrific novel. Sort of like "The Matrix" (it pre-dates The Matrix by several years) but a world in the imagination of a master criminal made up of bits from old movies. If you are a fan of old films, particularly film noir, you will get even more out of this novel.
March 10, 2016
I want to love Newman, but this isn't the first time I've felt like his writing is more of an exercise in including cool things than actually being good. I sure hope his Anno Dracula is good, I really want to read that, but I have little cause to think it will be.
July 31, 2016
Interesting and well done. Strange but wonderful mix of those film noire movies and future tech. Scary in the AI sense, but fun in the imagination and setting. Ending was a bit abrupt, and the feel of the book definitely left an oily residue. I am looking forward to reading more by this author.
Want to read
September 10, 2010future cyberpunk
*note to self. Copy from A.
May 30, 2011
An interesting but difficult read. Too many references to obscure movies.
January 22, 2014
A fun little film noir/cyberpunk story.
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