After finishing Matt Ruff‘s amazing novel Lovecraft Country, I immediately requested 88 Names and Bad Monkeys by the same author. (If you haven’t read Lovecraft Country, you’re missing out, especially if you thought the HBO show was a pretty great concept that would be improved with more backstory and less gore.)

88 Names is about an MMORPG sherpa, John Chu. He and his team help gamer tourists through exciting boss battles and virtual adventures, for a fee. When they get a bizarre new client, with no virtual footprint and way too much cash, John can’t help investigating, and the nerd mystery takes us everywhere from North Korea to text-based muds.

What if there was the virtual world adventure of Ready Player One, but when there’s a nerd culture reference it’s actually used as a gatekeeping reference, and not as the basis of the entire plot? I mean, I loved Ready Player One, but I’ve also met a lot of gamer guys who think knowing pop culture trivia is the same thing as having a personality, so…

The villains in this are believable and dark, and the gamesworld feel familiar enough without feeling like knockoffs. (I skimmed a bit of the virtual space battle part — the author has accurately captured how boring I find both Eve Online and internet edgelords).

I sort of knew, after reading Bad Monkeys, that there was going to be a double or triple cross, and virtual-friend-has-a-RL-secret is a given in any virtual world adventure story, but I could not predict the ending in any way. Each time there was a new reveal, I thought WHAT?!?!? Oh, right… there was definitely a hint about that earlier and that’s the absolute best way to feel about a reveal.

I’ve had a bunch of one-sitting reads in the pandemic, so it’s not quite the stunning endorsement that it would be in other, non-quarantined years, but still. One-sitting read.