Jane's Game by Hertzan Chimera

Jane's Game Reviews

• 
  Dark Recesses

  Jane's Game
  By
  Mike Philbin
  CHIMERICANA BOOKS (2006)
  
  Mike Philbin is sort of the David Lynch of the horror world.
  Of course, I mean that in a good way.
  But along with that compliment comes a caveat: Not everyone 'gets' Lynch as an artist. This confusing creative dichotomy is no more apparent than in Philbin's latest novel, JANE'S GAME, the story of an ex-model who might not be all she seems at first glance. There's a story here, and some rather fine writing as well, but because both tend to get submerged by a seemingly stylized obscurity and will to abstraction, it may not come across to all readers. Like a literary roller coaster, we are tossed from one scene to another, at times, even from one character to another, without any of the usual niceties of conventional storytelling. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Phillip K. Dick sometimes used this method to keep his readers off balance. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. Along those lines, JANE'S GAME does work most of the time. After all, Philbin knows how to turn a phrase, and can send a metaphor in the air and make it sizzle—no problems there. But JANE'S GAME is not a read for the meek, certainly not for the squeamish. A reader coming to it with the belief that all modern literature is an easy and passive affair need not apply. This book demands your full attention and complicity. I found myself having to go back and make sure I had caught all of the previous details as the story shifted away and fell into yet another bizarre layer.
  There are some marvelous passages, rife with classical style trappings, combined with a pissed off Beatnik sensibility. Philbin provides a sense of the erotic to even some of the most gruesome of his set pieces, as he examines art and the artist, the body and the mind, and sensuality and perversity with a daredevil abandon. The characters tend to become abrasive- much like Lynch's casts- and don't engender much in the way of sympathy, but because of their impossible histrionics, they sometimes feel more like players in a Greek tragedy than blasé cutouts in modern literature--- or demons in a drug-addled nightmare.
  My final assessment?
  If you like your fiction edgy and surreal, then try Mike Philbin's JANE'S GAME. It won't disappoint.
  
  --Nickolas Cook.
  
• 
  SFReader

  
  http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.a...
• 
  Byron 'Giggsy' Paul

  Experimental and genre-blending Mike Philbin comes through with a quality outing. For me, the style highlights this book more than the underlying story, although the story is very enjoyable. Some hate labels, but you could call Jane's Game cyberpunk, phildickian, erotic, new-weird, bizzaro, transgressive, biopunk, or psycho-horror, and it never seems too much or too little, never too far from traditional literature and traditional speculative fiction - and I can never tell if Phibin attempts to do this or its just how his insane mind works.
  
  Jane ultimately is a programmed human intelligence (or maybe she's 100% human which seems to be what Jane finally decides on) that's possibly a top secret agent or maybe just a beta version sex toy for the ultra-rich. She's too human to be human, and along the way she meets some interesting men that are too human for their own good, and her sexual and intellectual relationships with these men hold the key the truth inside her mind.
  
  Also check some decent reviews here:
  http://sfreader.com/read_review.asp?t... AND
  http://www.amazon.com/review/R10GA372...
• 
  Hertzan Chimera

  this is SZMONHFU as it always 'should' have been ... RED HEDZ followed by SKIN SCIENCE (two partner novels written in the late eighties). Together at last.