★★★★
Dark Factory is a literary hallucination delivered in a hurtling, blink and you miss it style full of mind-bending dark imagery verging on madness.
I won’t lie. Kathe Koja’s Dark Factory was a challenging read, but only in the best of ways. Eschewing a more traditional writing style was a bold choice. But readers willing to take the journey are rewarded with an inventive tale that zigs when you think it will zag. Koja’s prose is demanding, featuring frequent perspective shifts and a sometimes stream of consciousness narrative. It was easiest to read in spurts. Don’t expect a lot of handholding. Koja throws the reader into the deep end from the get-go.
Dark Factory skirts the edges of sci-fi with a literal mind-bending, virtual reality premise. It doesn’t get cyberpunk right, but I think that’s the point. Gibson, Sterling, and Stephenson’s future of savvy street punks jacking in and hacking the big corps is so passé. This is a post-punk world, riding the cresting wave of content creators as philosopher entertainers. Everything’s coming to an end, so why not finish it all off with a mind-blowing party?