Dark Matter

Koja’s dizzyingly ambitious third Dark Factory novel finds the marriage between immersive experience producer Ari Regon and genius musician Felix Perez straining under the pressure of celebrity. No longer a scrappy young club kid, Ari has reluctantly partnered with venture capitalist Tom Hae to build a new platform that will showcase Felix’s music to the world. Ari feels torn in many directions by those vying for his attention, among them Bunny Graves, a big pharma heiress turned punk dominatrix, who is willing to resort to mercenary measures to insert herself into Ari and Felix’s relationship. The result is a game of psychological cat and mouse dressed up in cyberpunk rave gear and studded with blistering insights into the art world. Meanwhile, in a somewhat siloed subplot, “reality artist” Max Caspar meets “chaos scholar” Charmian Duglass within the virtual world of Birds of Prey and learns her theory that the real world is ending. There are a symphony’s worth of themes at play—from music theory to the nature of identity—and Koja is, for the most part, a confident conductor. It can, however, be difficult to parse her careening prose, which often takes the form of run-on sentences laden with names, places, and references to past events. Even so, this is impressive to behold. (Dec.)