A review by kateofmind
Creeping Jenny by Jeff Noon

5.0

I really like Jeff Noon a lot already, but these Nyquist novels are simply blowing me away. At bottom they're just good old noir detective whodunnits with speculative fiction twists, but the twists are some of the most inventive and unusual I've seen, for all that at bottom they also boil down to just more iterations of Noon's Lewis Carroll fixations. And I do mean that in the plural: not just Carrollian word play, or Carrollian whimsy, surrealism, mathematico-logical offerings (I evoke Hofstadter as deliberately as these books' cover artist has) and supporting character hostility. An important through line to the story of John Nyquist's journeys through Wonderlandish communities seems to have wrapped up in this book where I would expect it to in the fourth and (I believe) final one, but Noon still has plenty up his sleeve, I trust -- and it looks like the son of perpetual daylight, who had to tangle with a whole city full of twisted authorial intent last novel and contend with 360 bizarre Saint's Days (each with its own inconvenient, creepy and sometimes downright hazardous paranormal behavioral compulsions) has now gotten himself a sidekick? Bring it on!