Synopsis:
Four friends unearth a unique VHS tape that, when viewed, causes short-distance teleportation with euphoric after-effects, inadvertently launching a perilous trend.
As copies of the original tape are made, the results become less predictable and ultimately gruesome due to analog generational decay. Despite the danger, some will risk everything for just one more trip.
Review:
Teleportasm is less a novel than a series of interconnected short stories, with our central cast of characters popping up at irregular intervals, leaving plenty of room for Millican to riff on the admittedly novel and entertaining premise.
That premise is that that there is a VHS tape of unknown origin that, when viewed, will teleport the viewer six feet due north. Other than the obvious novelty of the experience, the feeling of teleportation carries with it a remarkable sensation not unlike being high.
So, when the tape falls into the hands of a group of stoner teens, things naturally get out of hand.
Mishaps with the tape allow Millican endless play, and a good deal of gory body horror, as kids are teleported into walls, tree branches, and each other, and eventually the drug analogy leads to a metaphor for addiction that finds its culmination in hordes of zombie-like teleportation junkies roaming California in search of their next fix.
This is fun, loopy, imaginative stuff, and Millican wrings every drop out of it, telling as many kinds of stories as he can in such a short space, with everything from shadowy government agencies, post-apocalyptic zombies, techno-cults, and straight up gory horror. It’s a fun ride.
It’s also a rather uneven one. The frame story about our four friends is hamstrung by clunky dialogue and so little character development that it’s almost impossible to tell these people apart. Similarly, some segments are almost pure exposition, with no real moment for the reader to inhabit and prose that seems purposefully overwritten in an attempt at a kind of B-Movie schlockiness.
The trouble is that those USA: Up All Night cult films that I (and I assume Millican) love, weren’t really made that way. The charm of those low budget flicks was that they were doing the best with what limited resources they had, be that money, writing quality, or acting ability. Unfortunately, in Teleportasm, this is manifest as a kind of performative quality that reads as inauthentic. This ain’t a Troma movie, nor a book playing in a Troma-like sandbox, but rather a book telegraphing a kind of faux-cheesiness that didn’t quite hit home.
Which is a shame, because the concept and the range are so great, and the promise of those first few sections is so palpable. I’m also sure that many readers will have no problem with a little meta-B-Movie posturing. In fact, it might well be a selling point. But for me, Teleportasm is vividly imagined world that loses a little something in the execution.
very nice , thanks so much