HIGH-TECH MISANTHROPY: SCOTT JONES’S STONEFISH IS THE WORLD WE DESERVE
STONEFISH by Scott R. Jones, published by Word Horde
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cott Jones’s debut novel, Stonefish, is cosmic madness and mystery wrapped in a blanket made of the paranoid future-fantasies of Philip K. Dick and Lovecraft’s dread of the void. In a future where climate changed has lampooned most of the world and human interaction is done primarily through holographic chat rooms, already-jaded journalist, Den Secord, sets out to find a missing tech wizard, Gregor Makarios, for the New Heretic. Only what Den finds is more than an eccentric weirdo living out a reclusive fantasy and childhood obsession with cryptids. Instead, once Den steps into the unknown he encounters not only the dodgy, philosophizing Makarios living in a secluded, high-tech compound, but a mentally unstable AI that claims to have been tortured in a different dimension and a crippling existential crisis.
Jones has a mastery of language that most genre players should be jealous of. Everything from the dystopian world Den inhabits to the forest surrounding Makarios’s home might as well be literary VR for the reader. In a scene where Gregor and Den are forced to watch the archons (how Gregor refers to the monsters responsible for humanity’s existence) create life Jones matches beauty with grotesquery and we the reader are just as drawn into this moment of horrific sublimity as our characters are.
“Insects. The black, shining cord that split from the rope of water was composed of insects. Beetles and centipedes, annelids, things with no legs and not enough legs and way too many, snips and snails and clumps of flesh with malformed wings like discarded plastic wrap.”
Ambiguity doesn’t sit well with your average reader. Most want to know how the meat’s made, but let’s bow our heads in appreciation of the fact that Jones doesn’t cater to our lazy human need to be handed all the pieces to the puzzle and a map to where they go. It’s a gamble more writers should take instead playing it safe and spoon feeding the reader like they can’t make their own damn connections about what’s going on.
As a first novel, Stonefish is a damn high achievement, however, this not-so-humble critic, would like to point out that the book is a bit front-loaded in its world-building and exposition. Although interesting at times, Den’s minimal investigation leading to the first face-to-face with Makarios isn’t nearly as engaging as everything that comes after. The former could also have easily been peppered throughout Den’s time on the compound, which is where the book really starts, especially when you consider the fact that Secord doesn’t care much for his employer and what little family life he does have seems more destabilizing than a source of comfort that Den can hang on to as he’s sanity is put through the grinder.
There are obvious Lovecraft vibes present within, sure, but this isn’t mythos fiction—Stonefish is so much more than ol’ H.P. pastiche.
It echoes works like Solaris and Roadside Picnic with its portrayal of man being put in his place and laughed at by something much older and much wiser than we could ever hope to be. Through honest, complex characters and his immersive writing style. Stonefish earns its bleak, nihilistic position without coming across like that jerk in your first year literary theory class that talks about liking Nietzsche just to be cool, and it’s one of the few books I’ve come across wherein the protagonists look into the abyss only to have the abyss stare back and say, as Gregor explains to Den when talking about the the First Law of the Universe, “Show us what you’re made of, player.”
