Adult (or possibly YA) SciFi/ Fantasy novel. MC follows a woman onto a ship to a city ruled by her, where an addictive drug/ powder causes people to become mutants. Read approximately 2020. Spoiler. > Likes and Comments

Asking for a friend, who writes:

A guy (I'll call him Guy) follows a suspicious lady (I'll call her Lady) onto a ship and she has a weird indent in between her eyes (this is relevant). He wakes up and realizes that the ship took him to an extremely bizarre city ruled by Lady. She is basically the queen and everyone is poor except Lady and three people (who wear masks) that she has employed to be performers. Their job is to use this magical addictive powder to entertain the masses to keep them subdued.

Everyone in the city, including Lady and the Performers, are addicted to this powder. Guy realizes that the powder is slowly deforming them, causing their face (and eventually their bodies) to split apart. The city outskirts are filled with hoards of these mutants whose brains eventually split open, leaving them kinda like zombies.

The climactic moment was when Guy was fighting/arguing with one of the Performers and knocked his mask off. (view spoiler)[He realized it was actually himself, and put the pieces together and realized this was actually the same city he came from in an alternate universe. (hide spoiler)]

I never finished the book so I don't actually know how it ends.

Also, I believe this book takes place on floating islands in the sky but I may be completely misremembering that part.

Was the MC a teenage boy?

Did you read it as a physical book or an e-book?

He thinks the main character was an adult male, but describes it as young adult based on the writing style. It was probably in the teen fiction section of the library (so a physical book).

Drug that causes mutations bump.

SF—Drug that causes mutations bump.

I've got a list going for Castles/Cities/Islands in the Sky which may be worth a look - https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...

I've also started one for Meeting Alternate Selves but it's short and I don't see the book described on there. https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...

Any idea if the ship that the main character follows the lady on to a sea ship, air ship, or space ship?

SF—Drug that causes mutations bump

SF—Drug that causes mutations bump

SF—Drug that causes mutations bump

SF—Drug that causes mutations bump

The Thousandth Floor
has skyscraper in the clouds and drug elements?

Sadly, AI has ruined the excitement of these sorts of post.

Gemini has revealed to me that this is probably MirrorMask, although the protagonist is actually a girl named Helena, not an adult male, but everything else is exactly as you described, straight down to one of the Performers actually being Helena herself!

Oddly, it seems MirrorMask is actually a movie written by Neil Gaiman, though he also put out an illustrated script of it.

Hmm... but there's no drugs in MirrorMask... so maybe that's just a coincidence? Let me keep digging!

Gemini also suggested City of Saints and Madmen and The Alchemists of Loom, but neither of these sounds right, either. And another option is The Marbury Lens, which sounds closer -- male, unmasking scene, zombie bodies -- but it seems less high fantasy than what you're remembering...

In any event, now I'm invested, so let me know what it is!

Gemini is completely useless, as are all similar AI searches. They will just make stuff up with complete confidence. Don't use that rubbish.

Genesistrine wrote: "Gemini is completely useless, as are all similar AI searches. They will just make stuff up with complete confidence. Don't use that rubbish."

It's hit-or-miss, certainly, and you shouldn't treat it as an authority, but there have been lots of things I've vaguely misremembered that Gemini has helped me re-discover. Even with these results, none of them seems to be way far-off, especially considering I only gave it half the information at first.

Yes, and now it's going to pick up your reposts in this thread and interpret them as meaning its answers were correct because all it is is an aggregation machine with no ability to discriminate between right and wrong. Congratulations, you've made it more difficult for anyone to find the actual answer.

You're absolutely right -- I have now contributed to the slow decline of humanity. Oh, if I only had a brain and a time machine!

Though, to be fair, if "all" Gemini is is an aggregation machine, it can't really interpret, can it? So perhaps the world will continue on after all.

I've followed AI down the rabbit hole far too many times, and it has always ended with an hallucination, often simply leading back to my initial query.

So I leave it alone, and hope to find a human that's actually read the book to notice it.

A lot of the suggestions Gemini provided seem like pretty close matches. You should at least see if they ring a bell with your friend, particularly since our memories often mistake details or conflate two or more stories together.