Early Riser by Jasper Fforde

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Keywords: alternate reality, fantasy, Wales

Early Riser (2018) is the latest book from the skewed and very funny imagination of Jasper Fforde. It is a stand-alone so you can dip into it without fear of missing. If this is your first Fforde book then I recommend you go back and pick up the Thursday Next series beginning with The Eyre Affair (2001). If you are new to Fforde then I would give you a comparison with Douglas Adams to entice you to pick up his books.

Fforde is a master at world building, constructing very detailed, logically consistent worlds that are twisted to great comic effect.

Early Riser gives us a world set in Wales where people hibernate in dormitoriums during four long deadly winter months. In the lead up to hibernation, people put on as much weight as possible and actually grow a winter coat for more insulation. Hibernation isn't without risks and sometimes people come out of hibernation as Nightwalkers. Nightwalkers are basically zombies who, if not fed, will eat anything including people. Overseeing the winter months and protecting the hibernating residents are the Winter Counsuls.

Into this world Comes Charlie Worthing whose life is on a track to nowhere when he is recruited as a Novice Winter Counsul due to his skill at memorization. Due to a series of mishaps, Charlie finds himself stranded for the winter in Sector 12, a place with a disturbingly high mortality rate. He becomes aware that there is a sort of viral dream infecting the sleeping population with the same dream. Everyone in the dream sees a blue Buick. People are not supposed to dream while in hibernation.

Charlie finds the Winter Consuls have an antagonist relationship with HiberTech, a shadowy megacorporation researching hibernation and producers of a drug supposed to assist people in hibernation.

Nothing is as it seems and Charlie doesn't know who is actually working for the common good, HiberTech or the Winter Consuls. But he is determined to find the truth behind the conspiracies no matter the danger.

This brief synopsis really doesn't do the book justice but then I'd pretty much have to quote the entire book to explain it. Along the way Fforde pokes fun at global climate change and Big Pharma conspiracies. It is a fun read particularly if you have a taste for the absurd, which I do. I enjoyed it very much and recommend it and all of Fforde's books even the Dragonslayer trilogy which I haven't read but I'm sure I'll like when I do.