Exploded View is Twisted, Terrifying, Savagely Funny Cyberpunk

Terri Pastuzka is a detective working homicide in the Los Angeles of 2050, a city overcrowded with refugees, overtaxed by the demands of its populace, and blanketed in so many drones and augmented reality layers, privacy has become more polite suggestion than inalienable right. On the first day of the new year, Terri and her partner draw the short straw and are forced to investigate the shooting of a refugee. The city is mostly apathetic to the plight of these unfortunates, and even Terri can’t be bothered, sure it’s going to be another one for the cold case files—until the investigation turns up bizarre links to two other unsolved homicides, a network of gangs, and possibly even the city government. Terri begins chipping away at a conspiracy that will force her to question what, if anything, is actually real.
While the chain of murders provides a central storyline, McPheeters spends a lot of time immersing is in his decidedly unsunny future Los Angeles, with detail as layered and dense as the augmented reality channels it’s citizens escape into. There’s a deep sense of place and culture, from the caste systems within the LAPD, to the proliferation of NC-17 rated remixes of classic films, an eerie voyeuristic reality show, and social media games that incentivize harassment. One better, McPheeters manages to deliver most of the world-building through sensory detail and dialogue, allowing the action, character, and context. Terri’s case is pieces together from offhand comments and small environmental clues, each one growing in significance. It’s astonishing how invisibly the plot comes together, how much of conflict arises between characters who are, like us, just trying to make sense of the details put in front of them.In fact, it’s those small details that hide a widespread, massively manipulative conspiracy, creating a formidable enemy for a police department without the care or resources to investigate what hides in the gaps.
This all sounds pretty disturbing, but it’s clear from an opening freeway party all the way to an act of sudden violence at the close that these horrors are at least partly satirical. McPheeters threads the needle between an intense procedural and a darkly comic novel about a future in the throes of apathy. Expect to be horrified by something a character does on one page, and bursting into laughter on the next due to a running gag or black comic twist. It makes for a less harrowing, but no less effective, read—with so much madness going on around us in reality, it might otherwise be a tall order to ask readers to spend time in a fictional world where the cops toss out racial epithets while wolfing down curry bought from immigrants, and people walk around with a private laugh track playing in their ears.
Darker, grittier, and definitely funnier than most cyberpunk fare, Exploded View is a twisted, witty, occasionally insane novel about the horrors of a world not that far removed from our own.