RaveFull StopSchweblin expertly presents this unregulated world to us in intertwining stories of palpable suspense. Schweblin achieves a Black Mirror-esque effect in the novel by intertwining several storylines of varying duration ... [an] alarming, electrifying plot. One of the novel’s strongest techniques in building this sense of alarm is its choice to intersperse small chunks of many separate narratives, with kentukis as the only connecting thread ... She gives us, the readers, a cautionary tale about the repercussions inevitably suffered by playing fast and loose with the entanglements of human and robot. We witness the humans in each storyline lose confidence and control in their attempts to dominate the technology they have chosen to participate in, with fable-like moral consequences. The singularity of Schweblin’s moral consequences, however, is that unlike in a human fable, where only the human perpetrator suffers and repents, the cyborg fable compounds the suffering in unforeseeable ways ... a dystopic take on the direction our technology is headed. It brushes the abyss of the surreal, but avoids plunging into it with a plot that could reasonably take place today.
