The Beasts of Electra Drive

by Rohan Quine

From Hollywood Hills mansions and Century City towers, to South Central motels and the oceanside refinery, The Beasts of Electra Drive by Rohan Quine spans a mythic L.A., following seven spectacular characters (or Beasts) from games designer Jaymi's game-worlds. The intensity of those Beasts' creation cycles leads to their release into real life in seemingly human forms, and to their combative protection of him from destructive rivals at mainstream company Bang Dead Games. Grand spaces of beauty interlock with narrow rooms of terror, both in the real world and in the incorporeal world of cyberspace. A prequel to Quine's existing five tales, The Beasts of Electra Drive is a unique explosion of glamour and beauty, horror and enchantment, exploring the mechanisms and magic of creativity itself.

Jaymi is an independent games designer living on Electra Drive in the Hollywood Hills. Opposed to him are his former colleagues at Bang Dead Games. Their mounting competitiveness regarding his own extravagant game-creation reaches a point where they attack him physically with a flying drone.

Bang Dead is preparing the global release of a game called Ain'tTheyFreaky!, centring on five tabloid-flavoured social-media "Newsfeeds" for the victimisation of certain people by others--the "Gal Score," "Guy Score," "Trivia Score," "Arts Score" and "Cosy Score." Jaymi decides to fight back, for self-protection and to counteract this game's destructive effects.

He takes an irrevocable step: after creating Amber, the most dangerous of the characters (or Beasts, as he calls them) who will populate Jaymi's project The Platinum Raven, he releases Amber from that game, such that Amber slithers out from Jaymi's computer monitor. Appearing human, this now-incarnated Beast is sent to stalk Ain'tTheyFreaky!'s creators in real life--Dud, Kelly, Ashley and Herb.

While Amber terrorises them, Jaymi creates a second Beast, Evelyn, from his game The Imagination Thief. Incarnated too, she joins Amber in sabotaging a Bang Dead venture in the physical world.

As Jaymi's output spawns three more titles, he jumps into the creation cycles and incarnations of five more human-seeming Beasts: Shigem, Kim, the Platinum Raven, Scorpio and the Jaymi Beast.

Targeted by a more lethal drone attack, he decides his Beasts' missions must escalate: they will infiltrate the very substance of Ain'tTheyFreaky!. So Evelyn, Shigem and Kim sneak into one of the game's visual environments, where they try to put an end to some of its casually-programmed cruelty. Shigem and Kim shame two Bang Dead employees into secretly working for Jaymi instead.

Five Beasts proceed to sabotage Ain'tTheyFreaky! at code level, turning its own server farm into a radically different environment. Their sabotage breaks the game down into its constituent glyphs and pixels--then electrifies these, recombining them into brand-new forms of such enchanted love and wickedness and originality that they'd certainly have been forbidden by Bang Dead.

Amid the resultant conflict, a Beast is sent to kill a human; a Beast is arrested, before escaping and wreaking revenge; and another human is lashed to the transmitter tower above the Hollywood Sign, where...

After the ensuing convulsions of destruction and violent creation, Jaymi's Beasts slip away to their appointed onscreen destinations, one by one; and he is left alone again, just as he was before he brought them into being. As he fires up his newly-completed game The Imagination Thief for the first time, however, it is clear that neither he nor the world around him will ever quite be as before.

366 pages, Paperback

Published January 3, 2018

About the author

Rohan Quine is an author of literary fiction with a touch of magical realism and a dusting of horror. He grew up in South London, spent a couple of years in L.A. and then a decade in New York, where he ran around excitably, saying a few well-chosen words in various feature films and TV shows, such as "Zoolander", "Election", "Oz", "Third Watch", "100 Centre Street", "The Last Days of Disco", "The Basketball Diaries", "Spin City" and "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit". (See www.rohanquine.com/those-new-york-nin... and for current film acting and producing, including as Producer at Luxe Films, see www.rohanquine.com/those-new-york-nin....)

His novel "The Beasts of Electra Drive" www.rohanquine.com/the-beasts-of-elec... (Winner in the NYC Big Book Award 2021, and a Finalist in the IAN Book of the Year Awards 2018) is a prequel to his other five tales, and a good place to start. See www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-be... for reviews by Kirkus, Bookmuse, Bending the Bookshelf and others. From Hollywood mansions to South Central motels, havoc and love are wrought across a mythic L.A., through the creations of games designer Jaymi, in a unique explosion of glamour and beauty, horror and enchantment, celebrating the magic of creativity itself.

In addition to its paperback format, his novel "The Imagination Thief" www.rohanquine.com/the-imagination-thief (a Distinguished Favorite in the NYC Big Book Award 2021) is available as an ebook that contains links to film and audio and photographic content in conjunction with the text. See www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-im... for some nice reviews in The Guardian, Bookmuse, indieBerlin and elsewhere. It’s about a web of secrets triggered by the stealing and copying of people’s imaginations and memories, the magic that can be conjured by images of people, the split between beauty and happiness, and the allure of power.

Four novellas – "The Platinum Raven" www.rohanquine.com/the-platinum-raven, "The Host in the Attic" www.rohanquine.com/the-host-in-the-attic, "Apricot Eyes" www.rohanquine.com/apricot-eyes and "Hallucination in Hong Kong" www.rohanquine.com/hallucination-in-h... – are published as separate ebooks, and also as a single paperback "The Platinum Raven and other novellas" www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-platinum-r... (a Distinguished Favorite in the NYC Big Book Award 2021). See www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-no... for reviews of these novellas, including by Iris Murdoch, James Purdy, Lambda Book Report and New York Press. Hunting as a pack, all four delve deep into the beauty, darkness and mirth of this predicament called life, where we seem to have been dropped without sufficient consultation ahead of time.

All titles are also available in audiobook format and video-book format, performed by the author.

www.rohanquine.com

"Rohan Quine is one of the most original voices in the literary world today – and one of the most brilliant." - Guardian Books blogger Dan Holloway, who included Quine’s "The Imagination Thief" on his list of the six "best self-published books of the decade"

"A sensual ballet of rich characterisation, alluring subtlety and originality. 'The Beasts of Electra Drive' is a novel that I didn't want to put down while I was reading it. [...] I found myself underlining things on the page, throughout it, because of the allure of Quine's language. I was fascinated with the marriage of his vocabulary and his punctuation. [...] This book creates a luscious and sensuous effect, which you can expand into." - Suzi Rapport

"The swooping eloquence of this book ['The Imagination Thief'] had me hypnotised. Quine leaps into pools of imagery, delighting in what words can do. The fact that the reader is lured into joining this kaleidoscopic, elemental ballet marks this out as someth

Reviews

[Kiran Bhat · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The Beasts of Electra Drive, Rohan Quine merges the techno-psychological with the interior. The Beasts of Electra Drive follows the character Jaymi, a constant recurring character in Quine's books, perhaps a cypher for Quine himself. The novel attempts to speak to cyber-creation and the repercussions of our technology addicted times. Quine's writing is melodic and well-attuned to the rhythm of his characters. I'd recommend his work to anyone interested in an even more postmodern version of Philip K Dick, with a more neo-feminist cybernetic vision.

[S.B. (Beauty in Ruins) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Beasts of Electra Drive is technologically intelligent, socially clever, and supernaturally chilling - a trippy sci-fi tale from Rohan Quine.

To start, let me talk a bit about that first part, the technology. This is a book that is heavily invested in the creation of technology, the programming of games and apps, and the design of the characters who populate them. There is a strong artistic element woven into this act of creation, allowing us to see how and why Jaymi creates each of his Beasts, giving them purpose and personality as well as form. Hacking is a big part of the story, both in terms of infiltrating code and in cyberspace interactions between Jaymi's beasts and his adversaries' avatars.

That technological element leads, naturally, to the social one. Ain'tTheyFreaky! is the application that promises to put Bang Dead Games on the map, and the one that drives Jaymi to abandon ship and start the creation of his Beasts. It is a despicable piece of programming that, all-too-sadly, would probably do very well in today's world. It takes the worst aspects of social media - bullying, shaming, slandering, etc. - and makes them the whole point. The more you bring others down, the higher you rise, and the more shocking your social attacks, the more points you earn. The worst part of the game is that it is not aimed at other players, or even at celebrities - exposing neighbors, friends, family, and random strangers will bring you the most points.

As for the supernatural aspect, this is a book that would have been entirely serviceable with just the hacking and virtual reality interfaces, but what makes it really compelling is the ability for Jaymi's Beasts to step out into meat-space (I love that term) and take on corporeal form. These characters grow, learn, and even challenge their programming - they are somewhat childish in their willful independence, to the point of being sociopaths, although they demonstrate real emotion. There is some wonderful genderfluidity to some of the Beasts, with Shigem never feeling "quite like a boy, being half a gender to the left" and Scorpio whose "nature flowers with so transgender a beauty," as well as a gay love affair between two Beasts who were created for one another. Lest you forget that this is a revenge fantasy, however, Amber is modeled after Rutger Hauer's character in The Hitcher, while Scorpio's defining moment is the fantasy of dominating an entire prison as the most dangerous boy in a skirt.

In terms of the overall narrative, I found The Beasts of Electra Drive a little repetitive in parts, but I strongly suspect those patterns and passages were deliberate on Quine's part, coding the story as much as writing it. What really impressed me, however, is the flair for language, with some really beautiful - and beautifully chilling - passages that had me dog-earing pages along the way. Personally, I found the social commentary and the digital sparring with colleagues far more interesting than the real-world gore that drives the climax, but I love the uncertainty or unreliability of Jaymi as a narrator, and the open-ended question as to whether the end justifies the means.

http://bibrary.blogspot.ca/2018/04/th...

[Theediscerning · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intriguing premise – a programmer finds his computer game characters coming to life, when his output is vitally important to the sanity of the world – is let down by rigid patterning and mucho repetition, and not going the way it should. Still, I think it's worth a look - the author can certainly write novels.

[Hermione Ireland · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary genre-defining and fascinating novel. So timely as cynical, talentless and opioid-pushing mass-media owners try and downgrade all popular culture - Rupert Murdoch/tv producers and ilk, I'm looking at you. Like a lyrical poem from ancient times. But more violent and with more gay sex.

[Sharon S · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Beasts of Electra Drive is a dazzling, genre defying mix of literary fiction, magical realism, and cyberpunk. Rohan Quine combines imagination, suspense, and vivid Los Angeles settings to create a story both thrilling and visually spectacular. A uniquely immersive reading experience.

[Bookmuseuk]

The Beasts of Electra Drive is the story of a games designer who becomes deeply disenchanted with the ‘lowest common denominator’ mentality of the big corporation he works for, and leaves it in order to create a game of his own. But when his former employers refuse to take his desertion lying down, something rather strange happens, and the characters from Jaymi’s game start to cross over into ‘meat space’ and become the arms of Jaymi’s revenge.

Quine’s narrative challenges the arbitrariness of commercial gate-keepers and the randomness of success – and has a lot of fun in the process. It’s an odd mixture of dark – verging on horror – with more than a bit of kitsch. Some of the characters overlap with characters from Quine’s earlier work (like The Platinum Raven), though this is not strictly a prequel.

The Beasts of Electra Drive makes use of passages of almost incantatory repetition – something we accept quite happily in music and in books for young children, but which is unexpected in a book written for adults. It’s used primarily when Jaymi builds each of his characters and draws then through into ‘meatspace’, giving the act the feel of a creation myth.

It’s a very visual novel too. Quine gives his narrative voice (and sometimes his characters), the eye of a camera mounted on a drone, able to fly across valley in zoom in on details miles in the distance – like a tiny reflection in the pupil of someone’s eye. It’s set in and around Los Angeles and swoops from the Hollywood Hills mansions of the mega-rich, through the glass-sided towers of business districts, down into the slums and back again.

Reading this book is a little like watching a particularly unsettling art house movie. You will be, in turn, disoriented, enchanted and repelled.

For all the technology involved, this is more magic realism than science fiction. It deliberately pushes the boundaries of the outrageous and challenges you to go along for the ride.