Imagine a world almost exactly like the one we live in, except that some of us are participants in a shadow "War" against an unknown enemy. Joe, the narrator of Trevor Shane's debut, Children of Paranoia, is one of the War's frontline soldiers. When he was 16, he was told the real reason why members of his family were constantly dying in "accidents" or attacks, and soon after that he signed up to start killing people on the other side. He's been at it for years; he goes where his superiors send him, kills whoever he's instructed to kill. Lately, though, he's starting to have second thoughts....
Children of Paranoia is structured as a journal in which Joe explains his past to Maria, a college student he meets in Montreal, where he's been sent on a mission. Joe lays his story out in painstaking detail, and the pervasiveness with which the War encompasses every aspect of his life helps keep readers' disbelief suspended.
The first half of the novel lays the fatalism on especially thick, though things pick up when he decides to run off with Maria. Shane intensifies the suspense here as Maria is shown incontrovertible evidence that Joe isn't just deluded, and making her susceptible to the same all-encompassing paranoia that drives him.
There are times when the full-on dedication characters show toward the War becomes a bit hard to swallow. But Shane pushes past those rough spots by maintaining a tight focus on Joe and his devotion to Maria. By sticking to that emotional core, Children of Paranoia functions neatly as a surreal variant on the noir thriller where evil lurks in every shadow and happiness either remains tantalizingly just out of reach or could be snatched away in an instant. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com