Review: Reality by DC Wince

Near-future fiction at its finest, Reality by DC Wince is a thrilling and unpredictable leap into fight or flight mode. In bits and pieces, readers are submerged in a strange carnival of limitless power, the desperate search for truth, and the raw potential of humanity’s survival instinct.

Charlie, Dale, Blaze, and Ernst make for an odd quartet of protagonists, particularly because they spend a decent amount of this novel hunting one another in a winner-take-all death race in the desert. However, the backstory passages of their lives, and the strange events leading up to their Lord of the Flies face-off are the heart of this tale.

Each story is a thread in a complex unfurling web, from Charlie’s recollections of whispered conspiracies in smoky pubs to Dale’s greedy grab at dark money that gets him thrown into the back of the black van. Wince doesn’t rush the drama, but slowly peels back the psychological depth of this bizarre, voyeuristic game, and the doomed souls forced to play.

At times cartoonish, but generally just raucously good fun, there is no shortness of surrealism on display, despite the title. In other moments, there is an almost cinematic attention to detail, not to mention a very contemporary and recently popular villain. Metatron is the sinister tool at the dark heart of this story, a weapon being used by a macabre group of elite monsters, The Syndicate, which hovers over the novel like a dramatic choir of specters.

Engaging as the plot may be, at times it can feel derivative – a bit of Hunger Games here, some Mad Max there, with a dash of The Maze Runner and some classic James Bond global conspiracies for good measure. At times, the plot gets hazy, or perhaps too tangled, even for lovers of heady sci-fi, but the author usually reins it in and keeps the plot on a wandering path through the desert. Suspension of disbelief is essential, particularly when the plot holes start gaping – having an omnipotent AI system feels like a trump card that isn’t played as often as it logically would be, for one. There are also some brief moments of gore and gratuity, but Wince’s artful language does most of the heavy lifting.

Wince has a confident mastery of vocabulary, but relies on self-referential questions as narrative fuel a bit too frequently. Additionally, there are many instances of the same idea, emotion, or event being described in multiple ways, from slightly different angles, as though the author couldn’t decide which description to choose. When searching for tight and sharply written prose, authors must “kill their darlings,” even the beautifully worded ones, or risk being redundant.

All that aside, this is a wild enough romp of a read that an invested reader won’t mind the stretched imagination. The prose is well-edited and clean, and most of the stylistic choices work for the tone, even if the writing bends some traditional rules. Despite some superficial criticisms, Reality is a knockout thriller with broad appeal for high-brow sci-fi lovers and dystopian YA lit fans alike.