The Extremes - Hardcover

Priest, Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312205414 ISBN 13: 9780312205416

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1999

Synopsis

In an effort to explain the eerie coincidence of two mass murders occurring on the same day halfway around the world, one of which killed her husband, Teresa Simon is drawn into the frightening virtual-reality world called Extreme Experience.

About this title

About the Author

Christopher Priest was hailed by John Fowles as "one of our most gifted writers." He is the author of many novels and stories, including The Glamour and The Affirmation. His last novel, The Prestige, was honored with both the World Fantasy Award and the James Tait Black Award. In addition to working on his next novel, The Gloss, he has also recently written the novelization for the new David Cronenberg film, eXistenZ. He lives in England with his wife, novelist Leigh Kennedy, and their twin children.

Reviews

A forensic thriller with a strong science fictional element, Priest's fourth novel provides suspenseful, intelligent entertainment. On the same day, at the same time, that a man with a gun committed mass murder in Kingston City, Texas, another armed man did the same in the seaside resort town of Bulverton, England. FBI agent Teresa Simons, 43, lost her husband in Kingston City. Now she's visiting Bulverton to determine if the slayings were more than coincidence. Teresa's training included the virtual reality scenarios of ExEx (Extreme Experience), which reconstructs violent events and requires participants to get shot over and over until they learn the right way to fight back. The FBI uses ExEx for training; companies market it for entertainment. Teresa uses ExEx facilities in Bulverton to seek parallels between the two murder sprees. But the GunHo Corporation has a major ExEx investment in the Bulverton incident, and wants to thwart Teresa. Could ExEx's feedback loops have altered time and reality, affecting or even creating the paired killings? Teresa's discoveries horrify her, but propel her into action. She endures a barrage of carnage to find her way back to her love. Priest (The Prestige) keeps one eye on his suspenseful plot, another on the SF angles that underpin it and a third, camera-eye on the real implications of worldwide instant communication, virtual reality and media-driven violence. If his lingo can get a bit thick ("It's the same thing, in algorithmic terms, as your basic what-the-hell symbolic adumbration"), his plot will keep most readers raptly amazed. (May) FYI: The Prestige won the 1996 World Fantasy Award for best novel.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Carrying less of a charge than his electrifying, prizewinning The Prestige (1996), Priest's latest uses an appealing premisethat virtual reality scenarios somehow influence real eventsbut applying it to an FBI agent whose husband is murdered in Texas by a spree shooter, at the same time as a quiet coastal village in England is suffering a similar attack, proves problematic. Teresa comes to England on bereavement leave from the Bureau, shattered by husband Andy's death, but she also has a mission. The town of Bulverton is quiet now, echoes of Gerry Grove's mass-murdering gunfire having long since died away. Teresa, though, wants to know why the killings took place simultaneously in England and Texas, and starts to open old wounds with her questions. Her quest takes her to the local Extreme Experience shop, where an infinite number of VR scenarios, available on microchip, can be loaded into a valve in the user's neck; some of these Teresa is convinced are linked to Grove, who stopped in there on the day of his rampage. Familiar with ExEx from the Bureau, which used it for interdiction practice, Teresa is still stunned to find scenarios depicting both the Texas and the Bulverton massacres already available, with a crew lodged in her hotel ready to do the definitive version of what happened in the village. Near-constant use of the ExEx material teaches her much about its possibilities and limits, but when she decides to take the bull by the horns and enter Grove's warped mindan option in one of the scenariosshe mysteriously becomes trapped in the past, on the day of the shootings. Engaging to a point, until the tracing of Teresa's learning curve crowds out all other characters and plot developments: the gimmickry and her personality just aren't compelling enough to carry the story on their own. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FBI special agents Teresa Simon and her husband, Andy, have been trained in ExEx--Extreme Experience--a kind of virtual reality enabling intelligence officers to relive scenes of carnage, murder, and brutality as they learn to save themselves. Andy is investigating the possibility of connecting killers with victims thought to be random, in the hope of becoming able to predict violent outbursts, when, ironically, he is killed by a crazed gunman on a shooting spree. Teresa takes a restorative trip to England, her birthplace, sojourning in Bulverton, a sleepy former resort town. There, she winds up investigating a mass murderer's shootings of her hotel's owners, the barmaid's husband, and many others on the very day of Andy's death. Thanks to a bourbon-induced haze, the line between reality and ExEx blurs for panicky Teresa, and suddenly she is "experiencing" the violence in Bulverton. Or was she dreaming? hallucinating? If not, who is controlling her ExEx experience? This enthralling fantasy seems tailor-made for film, filled as it is with images blurring time and space. Whitney Scott

Edition details

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0312205414
• ISBN 13: 9780312205416
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 393