Afterparty by Daryl Gregory

Afterparty, is about a permanently overdosed neuroscientist that accidentally became the first person in a type I trial for a drug she'd been working on, and which she swore to never let into the wilds. It starts out like a cross between One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test and is pulling me relentlessly along. Having worked in a biotech start-up looking for better brain drugs, and being a Broken/Puritan/Romantic/ at heart, the story makes all too much sense. Oh, and it's well written. Daryl Gregory is like a dark Rob Sawyer.

Afterparty is about a neuroscientist that accidentally overdoes on a drug that turns on the “I see God” portion of your brain. She swore that she’d never let the drug get into the wilds, but when a young girl with symptoms very much like her own commits suicide, she has to retrace her steps into the past to find out who let the gods out.. It starts out like a cross between One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test and is pulling me relentlessly along. Daryl Gregory is like a dark William Gibson, Peter Watt and Rob Sawyer all in one.

Afterparty, is about a permanently overdosed neuroscientist that accidentally became the first person in a type I trial for a drug she’d been working on, and which she swore to never let into the wilds. It starts out like a cross between One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test and is pulling me relentlessly along. Having worked in a biotech start-up looking for better brain drugs, and being a Broken/Puritan/Romantic/ at heart, the story makes all too much sense. Oh, and it’s well written. Daryl Gregory is like a dark William Gibson.

Links / References

https://www.netgalley.com/reviewer/viewReview?book_id=42297

Publishers Information:

 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.