Laith

If you like Dan Brown, you will like this latest entry in the Robert Langdon series. It's more of the same and doesn't deviate from the formula.

It's been a very long time since I've picked up a Robert Langdon novel, and reading The Secret of Secrets reminded me why. I don't really care for Dan Brown's books — which is a difficult admission to make, especially when I'd wager that most of the planet, myself included, has read and enjoyed The Da Vinci Code.

It's not that the series has gotten worse, or that Brown is a poor author. My issue is almost the opposite: it's the consistency. Once you've read one, you've read them all. They follow a fixed blueprint — Langdon goes to an exotic place, meets a beautiful woman, and gets sucked into an increasingly complex mystery. Part travelogue and part thriller, these books blend science, history, and religion into a carefully crafted conspiracy. The narration bounces between extremely detailed descriptions of the setting and alternating perspectives of Langdon and the principal cast, each chapter ending on a cliffhanger to keep you turning pages. This time Langdon is in Prague with his girlfriend Katherine Solomon, a researcher delivering a lecture on noetic science and human consciousness, who gets drawn into a complex plot to suppress her latest findings.

The Secret of Secrets doesn't stray one iota from that formula, and while your mileage may vary, I found myself getting bored. The travelogue aspect has always been what I enjoy most — Brown blends vivid descriptions with historical fun facts better than almost anyone — but that only accounts for about a third of the book. Perspective shifts don't usually bother me, but I hate how Brown executes them here. The relentless cliffhanger chapters make me feel like a volleyball, constantly bounced back and forth with very little development to show for it. The story meanders, splitting its focus needlessly. Despite an interesting premise and a thoughtful focus on noetic science, this was about 200 pages too long.

These books are like pizza — always good, incredible on the first try, but subject to diminishing returns. I read up to Inferno before having my fill of the formula the last time around. It was nice to revisit this universe, and I'll probably read the next one — but I'm not in any hurry.

Dengue Boy is the best piece of science fiction written in 2023, and I'd go further: it belongs to the foundational canon of the coming century of literature. That's a claim I don't make lightly, and I'll spend the rest of this review earning it.

The titular Dengue Boy is a half-human, half-mosquito hybrid mutant living in post-apocalyptic Argentina, where melting icecaps have submerged urban centres and redrawn the coastline across what used to be the arid Pampas plains. He lives in abject poverty, bullied for his mutations, his life devoid of comfort — even maternal love. When Dengue Boy comes of age he realizes he is in fact Dengue Girl, a female mosquito, and with that awakening comes a previously dormant lust for blood and vengeance. What follows is a brutal, gory rampage across future Argentina, interwoven non-linearly with two other narratives: El Dulce, the younger brother of a smuggler, whose story revolves around pre-human psychic stone artifacts smuggled out of Antarctica; and Rene, a girl from a wealthy family whose father is a successful virofinancier, who escapes into a popular virtual reality game called Christians v. Indians. Presiding over all of it is the enigmatic Noah Nuclopio, the wealthiest man in the world, CEO of Influenza Financial Services, and the ultimate antagonist of the book.

I'm tempted to coin a genre here: Viropunk. A mashup of body horror, climate fiction, and cyberpunk, all keyed to modern pandemic anxiety. The classic cyberpunk framework — society packed into mega-cities, classist segregation, corporate greed running rampant, body modification normalized — is all present, but instead of technology as the transhuman frontier, Nieva substitutes mutation and virology. Think of the transhuman themes in Ghost in the Shell or The Matrix and compare them to Dengue Girl's transition across gender, morality, and her ultimate abandonment of humanity; or society's transition into a hypercapitalist predatory marketplace organized entirely around disease. The digital and technological dystopia isn't absent either, it bleeds through in the hyperviolent VR game that El Dulce and Rene are obsessed with — but it's subordinate to the biological. It's not a one-to-one substitution; it's a total re-imagining.

The standout concept is virofinance: the reorganization of the world economy around the discovery and monopolization of potential pandemics and their vaccines. In this melted future, prehistoric bacteria and viruses are released and begin rapidly mutating, making pandemic and disease simultaneously the primary biological threat and the primary economic engine. It's a dangerously plausible extrapolation. We already know it's only regulatory frameworks that limit the proceeds and influence of major pharmaceutical corporations — frameworks that can dissolve overnight, as we saw with Operation Warp Speed. A relaxed regulatory environment, an ongoing exigent threat, and corporatist human greed: the logical endpoint is exactly the marketplace Nieva imagines. It reminded me of Crassus, Rome's wealthiest man, who built his fortune on slave trading and a private fire brigade that would arrive at a burning home, water in hand, and demand payment before acting. Virofinance is arguably the most predatory financial model conceivable within a fully capitalist system, and Nieva renders it with complete conviction.

Then there is the Caribbean Antarctic: a terraformed cluster of islands and peninsulas occupying the location of the former icecaps. A testament to human hubris — an artificial paradise constructed over the ruins, and the cause of the ruins, of modern civilisation. The idea that the Antarctic could melt so completely is terrifying. That we would build on top of it anyway is the kind of absurdist extrapolation that lands like a gut punch precisely because it isn't absurd at all. The novel quietly discloses that we never stopped drilling for Arctic resources either — going so deep that we eventually uncovered the frozen remnants of a prior, non-human civilization. That detail alone would be the centerpiece of a lesser book.

The closest comparison I can make is Neuromancer. Just as Gibson's novel signaled the coming technological revolution, following on the heels of usenet and proto-hacker culture, Dengue Boy follows on the heels of a global pandemic and an accelerating climate disaster, and I believe it to be the harbinger of the next major wave of climate fiction. They share a conceptual density, a plausibility of imagined future, and the quality of being genuinely novel — books that feel like nothing that preceded them. Where they differ is in temperament: cyberpunk is humanist and exploratory; Dengue Boy leans into pessimism and horror. They play in the same sandbox but have built wildly different castles. And where Neuromancer dealt in a more tangible subject — technology being something we actively, relentlessly developed — Dengue Boy is more cautionary, commenting on the societal fears and power structures most ripe for exploitation when the worst arrives.

Reading Dengue Boy is an exercise in trusting the author. It is non-linear, multi-threaded, and thoroughly experimental — challenging in prose, subject matter, and structure simultaneously. I was never lost across the multiple perspectives, but the non-linear storytelling raises questions it never fully resolves, and that's a valid criticism. I'd say this: the book is not incomprehensible, but it is genuinely difficult, and whether that difficulty rewards you will depend entirely on the kind of reader you are. It also deals in body horror and some genuinely grotesque sexual imagery — sheepies, which I will describe only as living comfort objects of an intimate nature, are apparently a fixture of this future, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Personally I found it all exactly the right amount of weird: enough to make you recoil, not enough to make you stop, and if anything it made me read faster, desperate to understand what was happening.

[Spoilers follow for the ending of the book]

What cements Dengue Boy's place in the Argentine literary tradition is its ending, and specifically its debt to Borges. In the final movement, El Dulce — already dead in the present, having been killed by Dengue Girl — replaces the power source of his VR headset with one of the psychic stones, embarking on a vision quest across time and space, witnessing the entirety of creation before coming to inhabit the body of Noah Nuclopio in a future he has no right to exist in. The connection to Borges' The Aleph — a story about a point in space that contains all other points, allowing the viewer to see the entire universe at once — is unmistakable. This isn't an outright retelling, but it touches the same themes of infinity and identity with comparable prosodic complexity. I'll also say this: knowing the ending won't prepare you for the ending. This book is more experiential than anything — the journey is the point, and no summary can replicate what it's actually like to arrive there.

In the winter of 2018 I spent three weeks in Buenos Aires, originally for a work-study programme that was derailed by a government shutdown. What I got instead was an immersion in Argentine life: the political instability, the wealth disparity, the legacy of Spanish conquest, the texture of a country shaped by boom-bust cycles and a permanent anxiety about the next financial collapse. Reading Dengue Boy transported me straight back. The climate anxiety, the financial precarity, the gap between those in the towering skyline of El Centro and those eking out existence in the colorful squalor of La Boca — it's all here, extrapolated forward into a future that feels less like speculation and more like inevitability. One of my greatest regrets from that trip was not making it to Patagonia, not seeing the Pampas or the Moreno glacier, because 2018 may have been my best and possibly last chance. Dengue Boy is set in the world where that window has closed for good.

I quite enjoyed Sabella, even if I haven’t read enough in the genres it plays with to truly appreciate it. Fully titled Sabella, or The Blood Stone, this is a mashup of SF horror, interplanetary romance, and a little southern gothic added for flavour. Despite being lost on me, by all accounts the genre commentary is masterfully done. I still found this to be Tanith Lee at her best: direct, illustrative, dark, and intense.

The titular Sabella is a woman living alone on the prairies of Nova Mars with only wolves for company. She’s pale, allergic to sunlight, irresistible to men, and possessed by an insatiable lust for blood. She’s a vampire — and not just any vampire, a space vampire (woooo). Lured off-planet by the promise of an inheritance, Sabella is drawn into a plot that seeks to expose her and lead her to her doom.

This is a short read, and yet there’s so much to love. Tanith Lee has been a consistent favourite of mine when it comes to world building, and I adore the universe of Sabella — it’s a fresh take on Barsoom and the world of Edgar Rice Burroughs, wearing its influences on its sleeve while still being wholly original.

I’ll admit that, like many other readers, the ending is where this lost me. Vampires have never tickled my palate, and even space vampires aren’t enough of a twist to separate me from my prejudice. There’s clearly something being said here about sexuality — Sabella’s vampirism arrives with puberty, her feeding is rendered as inseparable from sex itself, and the dominant-submissive shape the ending romance takes feels like the logical endpoint of that thread rather than a swerve into kink for its own sake. I can’t fully untangle what Lee is arguing about desire and power through that lens, and I don’t think the book hands you a tidy answer either, but the throughline from “vampire” to “adolescent sexual awakening” to “submission” is too consistent to be incidental. I just won’t pretend to have cracked it.

Tanith Lee keeps it interesting despite my aversion to the subject, and honestly, with the exception of Blindsight, I can’t think of a vampire book I’ve enjoyed more than this. For fans of planetary romance novels, this is sure to grab you to the very end.

P.S. As mentioned above, there’s some required reading to truly unlock this book. The Northwest Smith series was highlighted in the recommendation I was given as a distinct influence this novel seems to be in conversation with.

It’s a sign of the times that this book has lost its charm, the entire premise is worn so thin by reality that it robs the novel of nearly all its nuance. I have to agree with other reviewers: you cannot read this book in 2026 and not read John Self as a proto-Trump, or a proto-Weinstein.

John Self is a lustful reprobate who treats New York as his brothel and playground, a collection of massage parlours, bars, and fast food joints. The only things that get his blood pumping are the thought of more money and more pornography; he spends all his time trapped in drunken excess, a slave to both. Told from his own perspective, though, he’s something to be worshiped, one of the haves — his obvious flaws meant to reveal the rot at the heart of society, to say look what your money has bought. He’s even self-aware of his own detestability, his mind occasionally turning toward the realization that’s obvious to the reader from page one — this is no way to live — only to turn away from that fleeting clarity and dull his senses with more, more, more. I can tell this ugliness is deliberate: the ugliness of the character, the ugliness of the prose itself, the suppression of conscience with drink and sex, all in service of illustrating what happens when money drives a society, when greed is good. Written in 1985, I’m sure this was a sharp piece of social commentary. The trouble is we now live in a world where the John Selfs of fiction were proven right.

What really dates the book, though, isn’t just that its warnings came true — it’s that its central observation about money was already old news in 1985. The idea that wealth and luxury are a panacea, that enough money buys you out of being human, was a tired cliché well before Amis got to it; what was supposed to carry the novel is the way it’s illustrated, the texture of being trapped inside that delusion. And that’s exactly where the book loses me. Spending three hundred pages inside John Self’s head isn’t illuminating, it’s just unpleasant in precisely the way you’d expect going in. His moments of self-awareness are so fleeting and so incomplete that they read less like insight and more like Amis checking a box, and there’s no real pleasure or surprise in inhabiting a psyche that announces its own rot this loudly and does so little with the admission. As Self puts it of his own kind: “You never let us in, not really… We’re here to stay.” Fine — but I already knew that going in, and the book doesn’t seem to know much more than I did.

That sounds like I’m faulting Amis for being right, and maybe to a degree I am. Maybe it’s millennial angst, the constant low hum of wondering whether my life is a joke to these people. But I was genuinely put off by the hands-in-the-air resignation with which the narrative treats the problem. The ultimate message seems to be: I’m just calling balls and strikes here, maybe people should read more, maybe that’ll fix it. Yet another one of society’s problems quietly handed off to the next generation. Maybe it’s the prose too — Amis is trying entirely too hard, pitching this squarely at the literati, exactly the audience already inoculated against the problems of money. I don’t believe for a second that the people who needed this book ever read it. I can say that with some confidence having just watched a for-profit cage fight staged on the White House lawn (Happy 80th T-Bone).

The book’s full title is Money: A Suicide Note, a subtitle that almost never survives into conversation about it, and it’s a shame, because it’s doing real work. On the surface it’s about John Self’s identity collapsing once he learns who his father is and loses his fortune — his own suicide note, of sorts. But it’s just as much about the slower suicide of his lifestyle, and beyond that, the slower suicide of a society organized entirely around the pursuit of money. That’s the genuinely prescient part of the book, and it’s a shame the title rarely makes it past the cover (if it ever made the cover), because it’s a sharper piece of commentary than the three hundred pages of John Self’s psyche that follow it.

A fair amount of books we call classics are real stuffy, boring reads — written for a different audience, they don't hit the same for a modern reader. You know the type, the ones you only half-assedly read for class. That was my impression of Crime and Punishment, and so my copy sat fearfully unread on my bookshelf for years. Until now. Contrary to my expectations, this is not one of those books — it's a genuine joy to read, closer to modern literature than its stuffy contemporaries.

Dostoevsky's own history looms large over this book. In 1849 he was arrested for involvement with a group of radical intellectuals and sentenced to death by Tsar Nicholas I — a sentence carried out right up to the point where he stood before the firing squad, before being commuted at the last moment to hard labor in Siberia. By the time of his release years later, Russia was undergoing a period of liberal reform, with relaxing censorship fueling a burgeoning literary scene. It's against this backdrop that Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment, while sinking into immense debt thanks to a gambling addiction — and the destitute conditions Raskolnikov suffers throughout the novel feel unmistakably drawn from this period of his life.

Every scene, every character, the city of Petersburg; it's all brought completely to life. The prose sings, the dialogue is deliciously dramatic, and the inner turmoil of the main character is rendered in the most gripping detail. This is a psychological thriller, and I don't just mean that it arguably established the genre — I mean it's so damn good in execution, in getting across the feeling of a murderer's guilt and paranoia, in watching him ever so slowly unravel.

The plot is deceptively simple: rather than a who-dun-it, this is a why-he-dun-it. The book opens on the destitute student Raskolnikov contemplating something terrible. Unable to pay for his education and thoroughly depressed, he has spent months locked away in his filthy closet of a bedroom entertaining dark thoughts; he's decided to murder and rob a local pawnbroker. Not quite in his right mind, and incensed by news of his sister Dunya's engagement to a dubious lawyer, he waits till dark, borrows an axe, and quietly sets about his gruesome business. What follows is nothing less than psychological torture, as the fires of Raskolnikov's guilt are stoked by illness, madness, and paranoia.

The ideology that incites Raskolnikov to his crime is just as important as the crime itself. He's convinced himself of a theory: that certain crimes are justifiable in service of the goals of extraordinary men, that humanity is split into two classes: mere mortals, and a Napoleonic class to whom ordinary morals and laws don't apply. It's a dreadfully half-baked utilitarianism, and Dostoevsky's commentary on the egoism of the Russian radicals of his time. There's a striking echo here of the arguments later made by C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man — the idea that rationalist thought reduces man to a mere product of physics and biology, and the warning against suppressing Christian compassion in favour of a nihilistic elite entrusted with the future. Raskolnikov believes himself one of these elites. But he is shocked, confused, and crushed by the guilt and horror he feels once confronted with the actual consequences of his deed, and it's this collapse — and his eventual absolution through Sonya and her faith — that gives the novel its real shape.

Raskolnikov is an asshole to basically everyone, all book long — and yet, seemingly despite himself, there's a whole host of characters who love and care for him. The rest of the cast is brilliant, and several completely transform the narrative in their respective moments. My favorite has to be the outwardly affable Inspector Porfiry; he absolutely steals the show, his innocuous, bumbling dialogue barely concealing a hunter's gaze, every seemingly innocent question oozing with suspicion and double meaning. Then there's Razumikhin, ever the upbeat and loyal friend — the golden retriever of the cast — his efforts to help unwittingly provoking Raskolnikov exactly as Porfiry intends. And finally Sonya, the self-sacrificing and compassionate daughter of a drunkard, whose shame in her profession and quiet moral strength become the catalyst for Raskolnikov's eventual confession.

There are people who insist you need to puzzle this book apart, to break it into its constituent symbols and philosophy, to really think on it. They should just try reading the story, because it's an awesome piece of writing, sure to captivate on its own terms. Part of what makes it so readable today is a stylistic innovation that was genuinely ahead of its time: Dostoevsky's fusion of third-person omniscient narration with the stream of consciousness of his characters. Contemporary readers were used to more linear, orderly narrative techniques, but this blurring of narrator and the inner thoughts of the protagonist is exactly what makes Raskolnikov's psyche feel so immediate to a modern reader. His stream of consciousness, the not-quite-first-person perspective, projects a vivid scene — an amazing drama of a man coming to terms with the crime he has committed. You peer into his psyche, come to know him, and watch his internal justifications crumble in the face of madness-inducing guilt. Just as you come to understand his mania, you also understand his weariness, the toll his guilt takes on mind and body. But you never lose yourself entirely in Raskolnikov; the scene stays grounded, the supporting characters animated and just as richly imagined as he is.

Crime and Punishment is proof that the classroom impression of a book and the book itself are often two entirely different things. I went into this recalling homework, and what I got was a genuinely gripping psychological thriller, one that happens to have also basically invented the genre. There's a tendency to assume that "classic" means "good for you" rather than "good", that anything assigned in school must be a chore to be endured rather than enjoyed. Sometimes that's true. But sometimes a book is a classic because it's genuinely that good, and reading it on your own terms, decades after it was forced on you (or you faked your way through it), is when it finally gets the chance to prove that. Being the grandfather of the genre doesn't make this book worse than the latest Stephen King novel — if anything, it's a testament to just how well it holds up that so much of what followed is still chasing what Dostoevsky pulled off here first.

P.S.The translation I read was the Pevear and Volokhonsky edition, which is significantly better than the older Garnett translation and worth seeking out. If you don't love the constant repetition of Russian names and patronymics, there's also the Katz edition, which is more modernised and localised to American English. Both are great — read Katz if you want something less Russian, and Volokhonsky if you want something as true to the original as you can get in English.