Strange Bodies a literary thriller about identity and horror comes from Marcel Theroux (Far North). The Guardian said that Strange Bodies exhibits “a capaciousness of imagination and sympathy: its exploration of human vulnerability, the notion that consciousness may be no more than “a trick of the light”, is moving as well as thought-provoking, as elegiac as it is gripping.”
From the publisher:
Whatever this is, it started when Nicholas Slopen came back from the dead.
In a locked ward of a notorious psychiatric hospital sits a man who insists that he is Dr. Nicholas Slopen, failed husband and impoverished Samuel Johnson scholar. Slopen has been dead for months, yet nothing can make this man change his story. What begins as a tale of apparent forgery involving unknown letters by the great Dr. Johnson grows to encompass a conspiracy between a Silicon Valley mogul and his Russian allies to exploit the darkest secret of Soviet technology: the Malevin Procedure.
With echoes of Jorge Luis Borges and Philip K. Dick, Marcel Theroux’s Strange Bodies takes the reader on a dizzying speculative journey that poses questions about identity, authenticity, and what it means to be truly human.
There is an excerpt available from Tor.com.
