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Users

A Novel

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Marrying the philosophical absurdities of life, technology, start-up culture, and family, Users is for readers of Ling Ma, Dave Eggers’s The Circle, and viewers of the hit Apple TV+ original series Severance

Miles, a lead creative at a midsize virtual reality company known for its “original experiences,” has engineered a new product called The Ghost Lover. Wildly popular from the outset, the “game” is simple: a user’s simulated life is almost identical to their reality, except they’re haunted by the ghost of an ex-lover.
However, when a shift in the company's strategic vision puts The Ghost Lover at the center of a platform-wide controversy, Miles becomes the target of user outrage, and starts receiving a series of anonymous death threats. Typed notes sealed in envelopes with no postage or return address, these persistent threats push Miles into a paranoid panic, blurring his own sense of reality, catalyzing the collapse of his career, his marriage, and his relationship with his children.
The once-promising road to success becomes a narrow set of choices for Miles, who, in a last ditch effort to save his job, pitches his masterpiece, a revolutionary device code-named the Egg, which will transform the company. The consequences for Miles seal him inside the walls of his life as what was once anxiety explodes into devastating absoluteness.
In a world rife with the unchecked power and ambition of tech, Users investigates—with both humor and creeping dread—how interpersonal experiences and private decisions influence the hasty developments that have the power to permanently alter the landscape of human experience.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 17, 2022
      Winnette (The Job of the Wasp) delivers an engaging story of a virtual reality designer stuck in a rut. Miles’s career founders as he casts about for a new product for his Chicago startup that rivals his signature augmented reality experience, “The Ghost Lover,” where virtual reality players are haunted by an ephemeral lover personalized to their own experience. Meanwhile, his home life presents its own challenges; his marriage is struggling, and his 10-year-old daughter plays increasingly violent games with her younger sister. Perhaps most troubling, Miles acquires a “ghost lover” of his own, and he’s receiving cryptic, anonymous death threats. The author convincingly portrays Miles’s claustrophobic interior, where the protagonist is held captive by virtual simulacra. After a vacation with his family rekindles Miles’s creativity, he plunges full speed into the creation of the “Egg,” a virtual-reality pod that encases the user’s body. Though a commercial and professional success, the Egg accelerates the dissolution of Miles’s family, and brings him ever closer to the source of his elusive threats. Despite a rushed final act, the author offers a vertiginous glimpse down a tech rabbit hole. In Winnette’s hands, the dangerous blur between the virtual and reality provides both a warning and a thrill. Agent: Kevin O’Connor, O’Connor Literary Agency.

    • Kirkus

      January 1, 2023
      The inventor of a cutting-edge VR project descends into a state of profound alienation. Winnette's recent novels have ventured into the realm of surreal Westerns (Haints Stay, 2015) and unsettling ghost stories (The Job of the Wasp, 2018). With this new novel, he's opted for a different route, following the life of Miles, a man working for a virtual reality company who has been receiving death threats. There are clues early on that Miles is not the greatest of co-workers--an early passage describes him manipulating his colleague Lily's schedule so she's working on his brainchild, an "experience" called The Ghost Lover, instead of her own ambitious project. His penchant for working late hours is but one manifestation of his profound alienation from life, which Winnette also evokes by barely using the proper names of Miles' wife and children. Winnette links this anomie to larger questions of technology and corporatization; later on, Winnette shares details of Miles' previous job, when he'd worked on an acclaimed television series that gradually compromised its aesthetic until it lost its audience. In the novel's second half, the VR company Miles and Lily work for has embraced an idea that the two of them proposed--an expanded virtual reality presence that utilizes a device called the Egg. Gradually, Miles' waking life, dreams, and VR experiences begin to blur together--eventually arriving at a shocking image that both reframes Miles' alienation and sets him spiraling even further. The sense of menace that Winnette establishes early on with the death threats continues to evolve over the course of the novel--eventually arriving at a haunted, haunting place. A disquieting cautionary tale for an age of virtual spaces.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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  • English

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