Dreams of Amputation

Dreams of Amputation reads like the nightmares Derek Raymond might have experienced if he'd written cyberpunk. An exceptionally strange work, but a smart and thoughtful one as well. Disturbing, haunting, and inimitably weird, this is a book like no other.\n- Brian Evenson\nGary J. Shipley’s, Dreams of Amputation, is a novel overflowing not only with ideas, but a different type of speech. From the first sentence you know you are walking into a world where you will not be led by the hand, and where even the characters will not be sure exactly what or where they are: “He wakes in a container, head like a sawn circuit, throat rattling like a battery cage, Dock Code Report flashing tortured symbols from the wall screen: the amp’s back.” So begins what in essence serves as a story brought on in full barrage, equipped with mazes, tunnels, replicant people, goat heads, paranoia, riots, brain manipulation, new disease… Shipley moves fluidly between scenes of various styles, grafting Tarkovsky-like passages of exploration with damaged circuits of putridity and fear, sometimes not far from the clipped feel of Burroughs’s Nova Express. Where so many other books would get caught in one mode or another, Shipley keeps the eye inside the mind alive, spitting other eyes out of the eye itself.\n- Blake Butler in VICE