What. A. Mind… Screw. Seriously, the amount of times that I thought “okay, so this is what’s going on” where too darn high. Jeremy Robinson really threw me for a loop with this one. Then flipped me again and again. It was crazy.
I kept thinking to myself, surely it’s going to end like this or this. And I was wrong every time. I’m sure that some people will catch on faster than I did but I’ll tell you what, it was still a blast of a book.
I read the entire thing including the epilogue and I didn’t think at any point Robinson was shoving religion down my throat. I’m a former Catholic – so a lot of the stuff that was mentioned made sense especially since one of the main characters was a pastor. Each person is going to approach the thing that’s affecting them in a way that makes sense to them. If you’re an atheist you’ll see the creator one way. If you’re religious you’ll see it as God. That all makes sense to me and really didn’t take away from the book at all.
I can’t, for obvious reasons, go into much detail about this book but I can say that it starts off like a serial killer thriller, then it morphs into a psychological thriller, then again into a technothriller all the while keeping the characters and the story the same. It’s a bizarre mash up that shouldn’t work but it does.
Obviously then you throw in two of the best working voices in the business in Jeffrey Kafer and R.C. Bray and it’s perfect. Kafer and Bray each narrate one of the main characters and it helps know which one of them are talking (since the story bounces between their points of view a lot in the middle section). Kafer and Bray are great and I hope to hear a lot more books from them in the future.
Overall, NPC was an absolute “what the heck did I just read?” kind of book. One that I’ll definitely be thinking about for a while. And one that will have me never look at another human being the same.