People aren’t supposed to know about the Spares. Technically they aren’t even human, just walking replacement parts for the rich, the old and injury prone, and the plain careless. Randall has just walked out of a Rapt stupor and a rock bottom job as caretaker, or more properly ‘meat attendant’, at a SafetyNet Farm with six and a half Spares; some of them have been used. There’s also someone close to the top of New Richmond that he very much wants to kill. Unfortunately, somebody, or something, seems to have started without him, leaving the victims with ‘unspecified facial damage’.

The book practically rings with echoes, some more overt than others. The antecedents are as much from film as SF novels: the drug-psyched madness of the Gap is as reminiscent of Apocalypse Now as it is of Lucius Shepard’s bombed out troopers of Life During Wartime, while New Richmond blends the scavenger hacker and street lowlife culture somewhere between Blade Runner and Gibson’s Sprawl and the bridge community of Virtual Light. Not that these are relatives to be ashamed of, and Marshall Smith is a good and canny enough writer to make of it something of his own. I just wish he’d not done that bit about the eyes – I’m very squeamish in that area.

Graphically violent in places, unsettlingly nasty in others, and finally almost overly sentimental, Spares is a curious beast and mostly works well, just about hanging together at the end. Perhaps I’m just not used to happy endings, even though only a few characters survive that long. Intriguing, prompting me to check out his debut novel, Only Forward.