It’s 2030 and humans, through specially developed phones, can instantly teleport anywhere in the world. Our story begins with someone using this technology to real world cyberbully (by specifically teleporting into their house and bullying them) someone into suicide through a terror campaign. We jump from there a few years later as the victim of this abuse’s sister is beginning school at an elite prep school. She instantly falls in love with her new roommate, who it turns out is the daughter of the CEO of the world’s teleportation company. This mother expresses disgusts at this room arrangement and the story goes from there. The first night brings on trouble and debauchery and the roommate is pulled from the school. The novel explores our protagonist’s attempts to find her, to find her her sister’s tormenter, and to expose the teleportation company for what it is. It’s all connected of course.
A funny combination of genres (some romance, some science fiction, some horror) that ends up reading like a little Connie Willis, a little Harry Potter book 7, and a little Blake Crouch. All told though, like other Drew Magary novels, my lowered (not expectations) but sense of Magary as a writer allowed this book to stand out as oddly powerful and thoroughly solid. Magary really shines in looking at how technologies that seem like they should be great would really be untold nightmares for everyone. This is especially true in The Postmortal. He also shines at actually narrating the horrors of and ravages of those terrible consequences of technologies that cross lines. This is true in both of his previous books.
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53202301-point-b?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=eNz74PGi55&rank=3)
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