Review: Earworms by Zack Duncan

Blending character-driven drama and hometown heartache with a psychological crime thriller, Earworms by Zack Duncan is an addictive spiral of visionary sci-fi storytelling.

A lucid-dreaming journalist with a penchant for digging up truths people want to keep hidden, Max Barker has returned home after many years to bury his father. He hasn’t seen his old friend Oren West in over a decade, but the now-famous case-cracking PI is at the funeral with an unusual request: Oren needs Max to operate an illegal memory-accessing device in order to locate a missing 16-year-old girl. Still reeling from the shock and grief of his father’s death, Max overcomes his hesitation when he learns about the impossible reward he would receive – a chance to speak with the dead.

Diving into the mental maze of other people’s memories is far from risk-free – tampering with a strong enough mind could get your own consciousness crushed, or you may end up stuck in the wrong head forever. Despite the dangers, Max agrees to help find the missing girl by plunging into the twisted mind of a bitter and lonely man, but it doesn’t take long to realize he isn’t a kidnapping killer.

At this point, the real investigation begins, with Max bouncing between various unaware minds as he hunts for elusive clues, patching together grim truths from the stolen dreams and fuzzy secrets of a small town. From deceitful DAs and drunken concussions to an incompetent sheriff with a bloodthirsty grudge, Max is the only one who can see the truth and deliver real justice.

The sci-fi elements of MemCom are the main notable diversions from reality in the novel, while the remaining pieces of the world are quite recognizable, allowing this creatively rich work of fiction to feel authentic, and even plausible, with Max’s power position within the plot making the story particularly appealing. A great deal of thought went into this piece of future tech, including the rules of time, the virtual reality aspects of lucid dreaming, and the risky boundaries – both ethically and psychologically. The recreations of invaded dream worlds, down to the most minute details, are impressively crafted and immersive, dramatically dragging readers through doorways of the mind, like scenes from “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” but with more urgency and grit.

From an editorial standpoint, some expositional passages tend to drag out, which can rob moments of surprise from readers, and seemingly from the characters themselves. The full significance of Charlie’s memory chapters is unclear early in the novel, and those sections can feel distracting from the real-time plot of Oren and Max. That said, the procedural elements of the investigation fold naturally into the storytelling, showing plenty of faults and failures on the part of authorities, so each character is multilayered and believable.

Overall, Earworms is a thrillingly inventive mystery, with impossible-to-predict twists, which has both the characters and the reader questioning the nature and consequences of reality.