Once your life is diluted to ones and zeroes on the End Man's desk, it's over. Or is it? Afflicted with dromophobia, the fear of crossing streets, 26-year-old Raphael Lennon must live out his life within the four thoroughfares that border his Los Angeles neighborhood. Luckily, he found a fulfilling job within his space as an End Man at Norval Portals where Raphael is the best possum hunter in the company. He hunts the dead who live, people hiding under the guise of death. He doesn't want to bring these "possums" to ...
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Once your life is diluted to ones and zeroes on the End Man's desk, it's over. Or is it? Afflicted with dromophobia, the fear of crossing streets, 26-year-old Raphael Lennon must live out his life within the four thoroughfares that border his Los Angeles neighborhood. Luckily, he found a fulfilling job within his space as an End Man at Norval Portals where Raphael is the best possum hunter in the company. He hunts the dead who live, people hiding under the guise of death. He doesn't want to bring these "possums" to justice but to keep them out of his firm's necrology database so their presence doesn't crash the whole system. When the company founder assigns Raphael a fresh case, he sets aside all other work to investigate Jason Klaes, a maverick physicist with boundary-pushing theories that may have attracted unwanted and sinister attention. Raphael soon discovers messages sent by Klaes after his supposed death-threats to people who have subsequently died. As he digs deeper, he receives his own message from Klaes, a baffling command to pursue the truth. As he unravels the mystery, he unearths the secrets of his own phobia-plagued life and the inner workings of Norval, whose corporate ambitions include a nightmarish spin-off of its product. Raphael must stop them or he'll never be free and neither will anyone else.
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End Man is a tech-noir thriller set in the near-future. Raphael Lennon is an End Man, someone who works for the NDMN: ââ?¬Å"Norval Department of Marketing Necrology.ââ?¬Â? These IT workers have the jolly pleasure of gathering every bit of digital data left by the recently deceased and packaging it into a marketable product. As Raphael tries to track down an elusive ââ?¬Å"possumââ?¬Â? (someone who faked their own death) he discovers a plot that could alter the course of life, and death, as we know it. To top it all off, Raphael suffers from dromophobia, a fear of crossing streets. This leaves him trapped in a tight square mile of dystopian Los Angeles.
I really enjoyed End Man. Raphaelââ?¬â?¢s day-to-day work, with its ââ?¬Å"mindfulness videos,ââ?¬Â? horrible bosses, and questionable morality, feels all too real. Future L.A. is different, but grounded, being based on the real-life area surrounding the La Brea Tar Pits. Raphael is plagued by hallucinations of deadly winds to the south, fires to the north, a glacier to the east, and chasm to the west. This gives the story a claustrophobic feel as the walls close in on the him as he delves deeper into the mystery of the possum Jason Klaes, ominous warnings, and strange murders.
While I really enjoyed this absorbing technothriller I felt that the story took a little while to get going. The mystery-thriller aspect is the meat of the story, but I felt that the book gets bogged down a bit in the beginning with the inner workings of Norval. A few characters are introduced with a handful of sentences and disappear with little consequence, while the inner workings of Raphael�s mind and his self-imposed artistic therapy are prevalent. Raphael�s character is one that I enjoyed following otherwise. The plot and his character make for a unique read that was wildly entertaining and fun.
End Man is an exciting cyberpunk novel that creates a fully realized and compelling world for a fascinating protagonist to exist in. It�s a really interesting read that is incredibly relevant to the technological and social state of the world today. This is a slick and explosive dystopian thriller that I highly recommend to science fiction fans.
