Deadstock by Jeffrey Thomas: A Reader's Review

Welcome to Punktown, a swarthy, seedy catchall of an outpost city on the planet Oasis where many of the worst elements of humanity and dozens of sentient races eventually end up. Anything goes in Punktown. It's the perfect place for a low rent kind of guy like Jeremy Stake to ply the trade of private investigation. As the novel opens Stake has just landed a new assignment in the form of the retrieval of a precious item for the daughter of a wealthy CEO.

John Fukuda, the one who has hired Stake, specializes in the creation and distribution of the product known as deadstock, food animals such as cows and chickens which have been altered to grow without brains, or even heads. Deadstock function purely as raw foodstuffs to be processed and served quickly and easily without the moral ambiguities that may come with the slaughter of living things. Fukuda explains to Stake that he has adapted this technology to create a one-of-a-kind organic doll for his daughter, Yuki. The doll, named Dai-oo-ika, Great King of Squid, by Yuki, is a small, gray, vaguely humanoid thing with no features save for a cluster of quivering tentacles in place of a mouth. It is the suspicion of both Fukuda and Yuki that the doll was purloined by a jealous classmate at the all-female private school Yuki attends.

So, Stake begins searching for clues, interviewing staff and students at the school, but also following his own intuition by checking leads on Fukuda's competitors. Stake is of the mind that , being a unique creation, the doll may have actually been lifted by a business rival looking to figure out how it was made. Predictably, he discovers that Fukuda has not been entirely truthful with him and comes to realize the true nature of Dai-oo-ika.

To its credit, Deadstock does not take itself all that seriously and so it's easy to enjoy it as a result . The novel is a veritable mixed grill of genre influences: sci-fi action piece, horror thriller and detective story, all with a fine coat of sleaze, as befits the setting. And though it may be sleazy it, at least, does not revel in it too much.