Black Helicopters

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I liked this story, but I'm not sure that I should and I can think of a lot of coherent reasons why I shouldn't.

The story is juggling a lot of balls. Each chapter flicks back and forth between different storylines. Some chapters of the story are set in the modern day, in places like Dublin and Albany; some are set around Mars two hundred years in the future; and some are set one hundred years in the future in the post-Climate Change apocalypse. Characters are assigned code names - Beta, Ivoire, the Signalman, the Egyptian, sixty-six - and do their bit at various times and sometimes across time.

It's hard to know what's going on.

The story opens with an apparently immortal woman called the Egyptian meeting with renegades from “X.” Apparently, she represents “Y.” Beyond that we don't know who these people are, although it seems that the Signalman from Agents of Dreamland - so called because he has his grandfather's pocket watch - is part of the “Men in Black.” The Egyptian is engaging in spy craft with the renegades.....cut to Deer Island, Maine where Ivoire and Sixty-six are shooting at Shoggoths emerging from the ocean and cut to Mars where the albino assassin - Ivoire two hundred years in the future - is planning an attack on Mars and waiting for the Egyptian...and cut to a fishing boat off of sunken Boston where someone is doing something on the information system that is attracting someone else's attention.

Back and forth it goes.

The author has a backstory and is not sharing. I noted in Agents of Dreamland that I was puzzled by the Signalman's sobriquet. We get the answer in this book and it isn't that special. We don't learn what is going on with X and Y or who they are or why we should care. Was Deer Island real? Seems like it was because the Signalman had to blow the bridge, but why did he do that? And really what was going on with Sixty-Six, Bete and Ivoire?

It all came across like a puzzle to me and I like puzzles, but I sure hope that there is a pay-off here, otherwise this will be a wanking mess.