Readers expecting something more in the vein of Helen Macdonald’s award-winning memoir H Is for Hawk or science writing are in for a shock.
Prophet, co-written with US author Sin Blaché, a Black Irish musician and emerging horror-speculative fiction writer, is a high-octane techno thriller-cum-queer-romance, which heaps up dead bodies and is stuffed to the gunwales with more self-conscious pop culture tropes than is strictly comfortable. It also feels like a bit of a throwback to New Wave sci-fi of the 1960s and 70s.
Sunil Rao is a jaded, traumatised ex-MI6 spy and manic-pixie shagger in a downward spiral. He’s seen some shit and has the PTSD to prove it. Rao gets recruited by strait-laced, near robotically-by-the-book-but-tender-inside military investigator Adam Rubenstein to look into a series of strange deaths on a UK Nato airbase.
The deadly McGuffin is something called “Prophet” – a Philip K Dick/Ballardesque substance that weaponises nostalgia. Prophet creates tangible illusions – memories of favourite toys, childhood pets, fairground rides, an entire 1950s American-style diner as imagined by a Brit, and, jarringly, a bonfire – which then proceed to kill their victims.
That could be cringy, like Sylvester McCoy as Doctor Who, but the pacing rushes you along too quickly and stylishly to worry about it. Speculative fiction is a useful catch-all genre here: the sci-fi elements are very soft and social, bordering on fantasy. No satisfying explanation is ever given for what Prophet actually is beyond being a plot device. Aliens? A psychic virus? Maybe it’s God. I dunno.
I bring up Doctor Who as apparently Macdonald and Blaché first crossed paths in a social media thread about the show during lockdown and started writing for a year over Zoom, meeting in person only at a rural Irish AirBnB to map out the novel’s conclusion. This may explain why Prophet often reads like elevated fanfic written for distraction in a time of plague.
Maybe I should call it magical realism. Rao, like Natasha Lyonne’s character in the TV show Poker Face, is a human lie detector. Except he can’t read Adam. Opposites attract and a kind of author-wish-fulfilment romance blooms. The mutually peculiar qualities of Rao and Adam that distinguish them from rank-and-file humanity also give them unique advantages when it comes to Prophet.
The trail leads to a secret lab in Colorado and a shadowy organisation, as they do, and a full-on trippy tiptoe through the head nostalgia death scape with a team of operatives. Lab leaks and contagion seem terribly apropos right now, as they were when the novel was written. Everything else will have you racing excitedly to the end, but, in all honesty, that end is weaker than the rest of the novel deserves.
If you are a habitué of urban fantasy and similar genres, most of this will not be unfamiliar territory, but you’ll have fun. If you’re a more general reader, the breakneck ridiculousness, trauma porn, spooky surrealism and anarchic breadth of ideas mean that something is bound to grab you.
I enjoyed Prophet, but this required submitting utterly to its rules – or lack thereof (don’t expect the careful trope-savvy logic of Kim Newman or trope-savvy subversion of Charlie Stross). Admire the sparkling banter, nerdgasms, playfulness, and engaging, if borderline cliché, characters, while averting your eyes to the not-infrequent plot holes. This suspension and surrender become more of a challenge in the last 100 or so pages – a little bit cloying, a little bit pretentious, but it’s not possible to get into that without spoiling it.
Prophet is enjoyable, pacey, fun and philosophical; a surprising collaborative synergy from two very different authors.
