“Cypulchre” Review by R. Leigh Hennig, Head Editor of Bastion Science Fiction Magazine

When I’m sick, I sleep. I really don’t do much other than that. I loaf around the house, ghosting between the kitchen looking for something to soothe my innards, and nesting between covers on the bed, praying for sleep to ease my transition out of my misery and into a more tolerable existence. What I don’t do is bury myself into a book, fighting the nausea, headaches, and other unpleasantries to find out what’s beyond the next page. Yet, I found myself in such an unusual position very recently when I was gifted the opportunity to read Cypulchre, by Joseph MacKinnon.



As described, this is a “dark and twisted cyberpunk thriller” about a man, Doctor Paul Sheffield, broken and unhinged by schizophrenia after the success of his creation. In a world where people have uploaded and transferred their consciousness to the CLOUD, itself a virtual heaven where the lame and able-bodied alike share and revel in all the virtual world has to offer, this novel is everything The Matrix could (and should) have been. Deceived by his own madness, Doctor Sheffield becomes the architect of his own demise. After creating the CLOUD, a transformative and pivotal point in human evolution, Sheffield is at the center of an incident that leaves a prominent colleague trapped in an earlier version of the virtual reality, his body permanently severed from his mind. The result is a scandalous fallout that reveals to everyone else the depths of Sheffield’s mental instability. Shunned by his government, employer, and most dearly to Sheffield, his wife and young daughters, the world leaves Sheffield behind to rot in obscurity, isolation, and insanity. As the monster was to Doctor Frankenstein, so is the CLOUD to Doctor Sheffield. Hell-bent on reuniting with his family and putting an end to the malevolence of the monster, Sheffield begrudgingly unites with a band of societal misfits and outcasts, labeled as terrorists, and sets forth on a mission to undo his sins, all the while at war with everything around him, including his own sanity.



As the editor of a bestselling science fiction magazine, I am beseeched by competent prose and keen narratives on a regular basis. MacKinnon’s prose is more than competent, it is wonderfully unique. I can’t help but scrutinize down to the sentence-level, and having been there, done that, I get bored easily. There’s a flair to the writing here that is a joy to read. It’s something you notice from the very first sentence and throughout the whole book, and not just from the occasional well-crafted line every few pages or so.

The imagery and depictions of this world is gritty and vivid, and reminiscent of Blade Runner, only darker. MacKinnon pays close attention to detail without crowding the narrative and bogging down the reader or otherwise confusing the action. Not all is wet and grimy, however. The settings are varied and distinct, which gives each a certain weight and keeps them from diluting each other.

Like the different settings, the characters are alive and have their own vivid personalities. Each is relatable in their own ways and I never got the sense that the major players were clear-cut heroes or villains. MacKinnon hasn’t written good guys or bad guys here, he’s written complex people, and as often as I found myself rooting for our protagonist, I sympathized with his detractors.

The plot is ambitious and complex. It was satisfying and complete and the execution is successful. At times however it is difficult to follow, and like Sheffield who needed his teammates to explain their plan a couple of times over, I needed to go back and reread a few sections to keep up with the movement. While occasionally jarring, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as this is the kind of book where you can discover things each time you read it.

My primary criticism comes from some of the technical jargon thrown about. Characters will be seen quickly banging out lines of code at a console during an action sequence to solve some problem, or code will be shown flying across monitors as part of the setting. It’s a little too flashy sometimes, and having some programming experience myself, it occasionally felt less functional and more of a decoration. This isn’t debilitating to the story by any means, and is not sufficiently problematic so that believability breaks down.

Joseph MacKinnon has done a fine job with this story. This is the kind of book you can come back to, discovering new things with each read. The length and pacing is appropriate, the plot and action compelling, and the characters are interesting, relatable (both good and bad), and well constructed. The world and consequences have been crafted in such a way that I think this deserves a sequel, as there’s plenty of room in this universe to explore the ramifications of its ending. I would be disappointed were MacKinnon to elect not to continue with this.

R. Leigh Hennig runs Bastion Science Fiction Magazine, a new science fiction magazine publishing digitally on the first of every month. The August issue is easy to pick up and hard to put down.