Afterparty

By: Daryl Gregory

Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert

Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

It begins in Toronto, in the years after the smart drug revolution. Any high school student with a chemjet and internet connection can download recipes and print drugs, or invent them. A seventeen-year-old street girl finds God through a new brain-altering drug called Numinous, used as a sacrament by a new Church that preys on the underclass. But she is arrested and put into detention, and without the drug, commits suicide.

Lyda Rose, another patient in that detention facility, has a dark secret: She was one of the original scientists who developed the drug. With the help of an ex-government agent and an imaginary, drug-induced doctor, Lyda sets out to find the other three survivors of the five who made the Numinous in a quest to set things right.

A mind-bending and violent chase across Canada and the US, Daryl Gregory's Afterparty is a marvelous mix of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, and perhaps a bit of Peter Watts’s Starfish: A last chance to save civilization, or die trying.

©2014 Daryl Gregory (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

Clever, Novel, Entertaining

What made the experience of listening to Afterparty the most enjoyable?

This was a very interesting story populated with very interesting people. I was impressed by the individuals who emerged from this author's mind. He's either possessed or a genius.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Afterparty?

Conversations with Dr. Gloria were always memorable. We'd all be improved if there was a helpful and insightful inner voice-- but would we listen to it?

Which scene was your favorite?

In this not-too-distant world, miniature cattle have been created through genetic engineering and one character keeps them in his living room. This is just a tiny part of the the story, but the reference to these mini-cattle is so casual, with none of the moral qualms that seem to plague our society. The description of this "Home on the Range" was a great scene.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

The opposite of the Twilight series.

Any additional comments?

The narrator was spectacular. She delivered a myriad of distinctive voices and had brought the characters to life. It was a marvelous performance.

keeps readers amused

The narrative is as engaging as the story, told through a functional schizophrenic. Good as a quick read

Sophisticated and pharmacologically accurate

Afterparty is a smart, sophisticated tale set in the near future (2030's or so) and offers a compelling perspective on evolving drug use. The premise is the re-emergence of a never commercialized treatment for schizophrenia that has as a unique side effect: a powerful spiritual / mental / emotional sense of connection with God. The story of how a failed biotech drug treatment is re-invented as a semi-religious movement is told by a smart, neuroscientist originally involved with the drug's discovery, but whose subsequent life has been a substance abuse / PTSD nightmare following their business implosion after a murder. Along with a paranoid / neurotic fellow mental hospital inmate who happens to be an ex-national security agent, the heroine delves into the source and reasons for her drug's revival.

The sci-fi elements are fairly benign for a near future tale. Scientifically and pharmacologically, the author is accurate and insightful in crafting an engaging and compelling tale, while at the same time maintaining scientific integrity. Beyond the biological neuroscience aspects, there's also exploration of what constitutes free will at the level of neurons.

The narration is superb, capturing the mood and tone of the tale. There's a solid range of both male and female voices with particular attention to individual peccadilloes.

God is a drug in this near-future thriller

This is the second book I've read by Daryl Gregory. He seems to like writing speculative fiction set in a near future, rather than settling into a series or a theme. "Raising Stony Mayhall" was one of the best zombie novels I've ever read. Afterparty, his latest, is also set a couple of decades from now, in a world where 3D printers have advanced to manufacturing pharmaceuticals, so anyone can "print" their own custom controlled substances.

Lyda Rose, the protagonist, was a neuroscientist who helped create Numinous. It was supposed to be a treatment for schizophrenia; instead, it helps its users find God. Or gods. Or some god.

The effect is spiritual if not supernatural: Numinous rewires the brain and provides you with your very own guardian angel (in Lyda's case, a judgmental winged psychologist named "Dr. Gloria"). The subjects are absolutely convinced they are receiving messages from the Divine, even if they know intellectually about Numinous. Lyda's conversations with her guardian angel, who she knows is a product of her drug-induced imagination, are believable because deep down, Lyda believes in her.

How Lyda came to be hooked on her own creation, and why she has to escape from a prison-hospital and track down the other former members of her little start-up company that was going to get rich, is a mystery that unfolds in a well-paced thriller with plenty of reveals and twists. There is an Afghan grandmother who is the most powerful drug lord in Seattle, a psychopathic hit man who calls himself "The Vincent" and raises bonsai buffalo herds in his apartment, a millionaire whose adopted daughter is a little prodigy assisted by her "deck" of "IFs" (Imaginary Friends), and of course, Dr. Gloria.

This wasn't quite a grand-slam of a book, but it was interesting and well-paced and original, with believable characters. Definitely recommended.

This book was great but I didn't like it.

The philosophical idea were interesting, the dialogue is really well crafted, and I loved the characters the author has constructed here; very much a film-noir-done-by-HBO style of characterisation an dialogue. Also this book is worth listening to just for the narrator's stellar performance of Doctor Gloria. Fantastic. Ultimately, though, the story just didn't gel for me, and I couldn't be bothered sitting through another well-crafted by fruitless conversation between the main characters as they sorted out the implications of a future with lots of designer drugs in, and had some more religious hallucinations. Very cool, but not my bag, as it turns out.

Unique

In the near future, several friends have gathered to celebrate the sale of their company, but their lives are turned upside down by a tragedy.

This book is primarily focused on the events in the life of a woman who attended the party. Her sanity is questionable due to an overdose of a designer drug and her friends also have issues with reality. She is a highly intelligent woman who is motivated by a 10 year old promise. The woman is also gay which proves to be an important plot element. There is action, several scenes of brutality and a lot of discussions about religion (another important element in the plot). Additionally, the F-word is frequently mentioned but is not an important element (unless I missed something).

Am I glad I listened? The topic is unique and the narrator lively, but I did get tired of listening to an emotional roller-coaster. There is a great twist at the end which I enjoyed. A solid four star.

An odd but good read

What did you love best about Afterparty?

It's an interesting idea and diving in between psychology, drug usage and abuse a long with technology in a grittier world is worth the read.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Lida was the main charcter. Her and her love are both interesting. Gloria is may favorite I think.

Did Tavia Gilbert do a good job differentiating all the characters? How?

.. she's not bad.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No, I needed breaks.

Any additional comments?

Don't expect a clear cut closed ending.

An Answer to the Mystery of Existence

Actually the most rewarding answer I got was to the question "Why is this book called Afterparty?"; ... and that came near the end of the book.

It was a tough start, I almost gave up near the beginning. This was probably a matter of getting used to the writers style and ideas. The main idea of a drug unlocking access to a personal god was just too intriguing for me to give up. Part of the problem was not understanding that the main character Lyda Rose was interacting with a personal god and being confused at the start of the book.

Once the story took off for me there was a lot of hair raising action, interesting characters and a major twist near the end to satisfy my baser instincts. And, while all this is going on we have this highly original idea of a drug called Numinous that unlocks our biological propensity towards explaining life through religion and a deity. Lyda, the scientist still keeps a skeptical distance from her personal god as she talks to it and alternatively craves and rejects its attentions. Others on her team who developed and ingested the potent drug accept their gods without question.

This drug was deemed too dangerous for the general public and got discontinued. The story revolves around Lyda discovering that it has surreptitiously reappeared many years later. She is worried about the harmful effects on the world and she tries to track down where it is coming from. The people who were on her development team are the prime suspects

As for the answer to the mystery of existence - if it was that easy, we would have figured it out after thousands of years trying to explain everything with all sorts of religions. We would all be in agreement at this stage of our collective history.

You will just have to be satisfied with the answer to the question of why is this book called Afterparty in this highly innovative, entertaining adventure.

"The brain is one lying son of a bitch"

Daryl Gregory's science fiction thriller Afterparty (2014) is set in the brave new pharmacological world of a few decades into the 21st century, a world marked "by the glories of the DIY smart drug revolution" by which "any high school student with a chemjet and an internet connection could download recipes and print small-batch drugs." "Everybody's a cook" wanting to try out new concoctions on human guinea pigs, many of whom end up in the hospital.

When a street-girl withdrawing from a "God drug" commits suicide in a Canadian neuro-atypical ward, 42-year old Lyda Rose--undergoing mandatory rehab there for drug abuse and schizophrenia--wants to be released early. Why? Because ten years ago neuroscientist Lyda, her now-deceased scientist wife, and their partners created what they thought was a cure for schizophrenia, NME (New Molecular Entity) 110, nicknamed Numinous, overdosed on it, became cursed (blessed?) with seeing and hearing their own versions of God, and agreed never to manufacture the dangerous drug, and now she wants to find and stop whoever is making and distributing it. Lyda's divinity is a lab-coated guardian angel named Dr. Gloria who writes notes on a clipboard, enhances Lyda's memory, and gives her plenty of advice. Because Lyda believes that Dr. G is real, she must expend great amounts of rational energy to remember that Dr. G is a delusion, and for ten years she has been trying all the licit and illicit drugs she can get her hands on (including alcohol) in an effort to banish her angel, hitting rock bottom when she drove a car at 60 KPH through a convenience store wall and got sentenced to the NAT ward. (Interestingly, were she able to rid herself of Dr. G, she'd desperately miss her.) To get out early, Lyda agrees to have a chip inserted in her arm that will transmit her blood data every ten seconds to ensure that she stays drug-free.

Lyda's quest to stop Numinous (now being repackaged and given away for free at a new chain of churches) is not a solo adventure. She needs help from Bobby, an ex-ward mate who believes that his consciousness is housed in an aquarium treasure chest hanging around his neck, Ollie (Olivia), an ex-ward mate who was an intelligence analyst and is Lyda's lover, and Rovil, who began working with Lyda and her wife as an intern and is now the VP of a big pharmaceutical company. And she must deal with certain antagonists, like Fayza, the grandmotherly Aghan drug-lord running Toronto through the Millies (her organization of self-made millionaire immigrant women), and the Vincent, an elite cold-blooded hitman when he's on his meds and a mild-mannered breeder of miniature bison when off them.

Lyda's first-person narration is interrupted now and then by third-person chapters from the Vincent's point of view and by third person "parables" about Lyda and the people she knows. Gregory skillfully doles out backstory through the parables so that the on-going story increases its hold on us. Finding out little by little, for instance, about Lyda's daughter is quite moving.

I felt that at times Gregory offers more thriller action than necessary (especially a written-for-movie border crossing scene), and that after a great build-up, the climax is disappointing. And the mystery part of the novel suffers from the problems inherent to that genre: depicting brilliant people who cotton on to the villain's identity too long after the reader does and narrating parts of the story from the point of view of a character who knows the villain but conveniently never thinks of the villain's identity. And Gregory writes one too many Bollywood simile.

But mostly Afterparty is a great read, with interesting things to say about the brain and its disorders, about reality, about religious belief, about relationships, about free will and human responsibility, and about the human desire to experience something beyond the everyday. As a wise girl tells Lyda at one point: "Just cause something’s imaginary doesn’t mean it’s not real." The fragile mental health of the appealing neurologically and or psychologically challenged characters and their valiant attempts to deal with the real world are quite affecting.

And the conversations between Lyda and other people when Dr. G butts in are fun.
Lyda: "My angel tells me what I want to hear."
Dr. Gloria: "I heard that!"

And Gregory tosses off neat lines at an entertaining rate.

"That was the nature of bubble relationships: prison, army, hospital, reality show, they were all pocket universes with their own physics. Bobby and I were close friends who hardly knew each other."

"I hesitated. My only backup was a make-believe angel and a brain-damaged kid who believed that his soul lived in a plastic box."

"'How are you doing?' he asked chartreusely."

Tavia Gilbert, the audiobook reader, is just right. She does convincing, different voices for main characters (Lyda, Ollie, Rovil, the Vincent, etc.) as well as neat voices for minor characters like Sasha's Deck Council and a computerized phone message.

Finally, I prefer Gregory’s earlier novel, Raising Stony Mayhall (2011), a fresh approach to the zombie genre, but Afterparty is a moving and exciting read that raises all sorts of issues, both macro (like the increasing prevalence of licit and illicit drugs in contemporary society) and micro (like the relationship between the brain and divinity).

Might be better as a movie

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

No. My overall description of the book is "tedious". The overly descriptive style, far too much exposition and the gratuitous language got so tiresome that I considered not finishing the book. The plot was interesting, but the author spent so much time developing characters that were tangential, describing every minute detail of the setting, etc. that it was easy to lose track of what was happening with the main characters. I won't purchase another Daryl Gregory book as I have to believe this is his style, not issues limited to this one book.

Did the narration match the pace of the story?

Yes. The narrators "little girl" voice really clashed with the frequent use of f*ck.

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

Maybe.