One of the most playful of novelists, the inveterate genre-hopper Matt Ruff (The Mirage; Bad Monkeys; Set This House in Order) follows up the chipper, revisionist cosmic horror of Lovecraft Country with an online techno-thriller whose plot hook gets roasted by one of its own pop-savvy gamers as "Ready Player One meets The King and I." But this brashly inventive story can't be broken down to formula.
After establishing a crackerjack set-up--a down-on-his-luck guide to the online role-playing games of the near future takes a contract to "sherpa" a mysterious plutocrat through the world of MMORPGs, drawing the ire of the CIA--88 Names proves predictably unpredictable, especially as the author seizes every chance to toy with the conventions and possibilities of computer role-playing. The digital espionage at times seems like a formal excuse for Ruff's loving parodies of gamer trolls, dungeon crawls, Grand Theft Auto-like crime sprees and old-school Infocom text adventures, all rendered in the breezy, geek-positive, charmingly profane mode he established in his 1988 debut, The Fool on the Hill. But Ruff is clever enough to make 88 Names' many apparent detours crucial to the revelations of his final chapters.
While he's sufficiently steeped in the milieu of gamers to satirize, Ruff also persuasively celebrates the pastime of adopting a fictional persona to embark on monster-stomping quests. Unlike most stories involving VR, all-powerful corporations and the possibility of catfishing, 88 Names never verges into the cynical or dystopian. Instead, Ruff invites readers to play. --Alan Scherstuhl, freelance writer and editor