Gary J. Shipley Dreams of Amputation

Dreams of Amputation reads like the nightmares Derek Raymond might have experienced if he'd written cyberpunk. An exceptionally strange work, but a smart and thoughtful one as well. Disturbing, haunting, and inimitably weird, this is a book like no other. - Brian Evenson Gary J. Shipley's, Dreams of Amputation , is a novel overflowing not only with ideas, but a different type of speech. From the first sentence you know you are walking into a world where you will not be led by the hand, and where even the characters will not be sure exactly what or where they are: "He wakes in a container, head like a sawn circuit, throat rattling like a battery cage, Dock Code Report flashing tortured symbols from the wall screen: the amp's back." So begins what in essence serves as a story brought on in full barrage, equipped with mazes, tunnels, replicant people, goat heads, paranoia, riots, brain manipulation, new disease... Shipley moves fluidly between scenes of various styles, grafting Tarkovsky-like passages of exploration with damaged circuits of putridity and fear, sometimes not far from the clipped feel of Burroughs's Nova Express . Where so many other books would get caught in one mode or another, Shipley keeps the eye inside the mind alive, spitting other eyes out of the eye itself. - Blake Butler in VICE