A dame walks into a detective’s office and asks him to find a missing girl. A familiar setup. You might have seen it before. Or maybe not. Because this detective is woken every morning by a talking magpie, and the reflection he sees in the mirror doesn’t belong to him. And before he can start looking for this girl, he needs to find out if she ever existed in the first place.

Welcome to the nameless city, a fractured metropolis where geography is malleable and reality is relative. Where consensus is a memory, and memory is the least reliable currency around.

And wandering these shifting streets, Johnny Orange. A ‘sort-of detective’, trying to uncover the truth in a world where the concept no longer applies…

“Stefan Mohamed’s brain is like the Middle Ages. You definitely don’t want to live there but you’d want to go there as a tourist” – Tom Sastry

Stefan Mohamed has delivered a fascinating and surreal blending of urban fantasy and noir, where the prose captures the unsettling fluidity of the setting with Dali-esque images conjured up in the mind.

The day was smudged silver, burry angles, very little detail. A vague suggestion of skyscrapers that may or may not have been there.

I particularly enjoyed the patchwork nature of the nameless city, which made me picture a kind of quilted cityscape, with each of its different districts having their own distinctive character and population, and a population who either didn’t know or didn’t care what their city was called.

Different people had different names for it- the nuns, being pretty literal minded, called it Fracture. Others called it Façade Spooksville, Vibetown, Zerotown. Some wags called it Sad Francisco, Loss Angeles, No York, even.

In a city where buildings shift and memories fade, our detective Jonny Orange is different and it’s that difference that makes him a useful investigator able to deal in truths and certainties as he is one of the Very few people (who) are cursed with the good luck to see what’s actually there. 

There is a Chandler-esque fluidity to Jonny’s investigations, alongside an immediate uncanniness with a talking magpie bring him ‘strawberries’ that seem to be some form of cigarettes.

Lots of flashes of noir humour illuminate the text, such as Johnny Orange’s listing of the many ‘dames’ who had come into his office as clients including ‘One dame who turned out to be two much smaller dames wearing a big coat.’

Or

She pushed her sunglasses down to the end of her nose, surveyed me coldly. Extremely coldly, from extremely blue eyes. That was a sub-zero look if ever I’d seen one.

Or

‘I wasn’t any kind of expert on weight, physics, anything like that. But basic cause and effect dictated that someone as large as (him) probably shouldn’t have been standing in the middle of that floor. The floor clearly agreed, because it gave away a second later.’

However, there is still something of the unreliable protagonist to Jonny, as even his memory can be fallible and misleading – in ways that reminded me a bit of Sarah Clarke’s Piranesi. Where Piranesi’s plight was eventually resolved, the tangled threads of his past rewoven in a way that made sense of all that had gone before, Jonny Orange’s experiences wade ever deeper into imaginative confusion. A varied cast of factions and characters grind different axes in pursuit of a mythical sword that may, or may not, be an actual sword.

Along the way, Jonny meets a succession of intriguing characters has he pursues a missing woman that only one person – the dame who first commissions Jonny – even remembers existed. Side quests and interested parties abound which leads Jonny to take a robot boy called Arthur and Arthur’s newly acquired human boyfriend under his protection, not that the robot boy needs much protection – just an occasional well-timed reboot.

Mohammed’s prose delivers fresh images and eye-catching lines like

Wind whirled from corner to corner like a hysterical dog searching for food that wasn’t there.

and

We passed clumps of rotting surburbia, collapsing industrial labyrinths, fields of cracked solar panels spilling curdled sun like acid.

Or when describing the effect of a local narcotic called wham

Fish was more accurate than he knew when he said it levelled you. That stuff turned you two dimensional. The chemical equivalent of dropping a cartoon piano on a person.

The narrative takes you on a challenging journey  as no memories are entirely trustworthy and throughout The House on Utopia Way there is that sense that the truth is not so much set in stone as written in water. Like the characters in the films The Matrix or more recently Don’t Worry Darling there is an unsettling sense of ‘wrongness’ about the setting that becomes more accentuated as the plot unfolds.

For me there was a contemporary resonance in the vulnerability of people to eye-catching evidence free ideas – beliefs that are chosen rather than proven. Focus was very important when navigating the mist of ideas. Devils make soup from idle brains.

In its faction ridden uncertainties, Mohamed’s patchwork city is a frighteningly recognisable place where truth is not so much an inviolate gold standard, as a malleable commodity. As Jonny observes, in moving between patches

“On top of that there was always someone trying to hack the mist, work their way into unsuspecting brains, manipulating and mining raw feelings to convert into emocoin – certainty was like gold dust these days, making me a high-value target – or influence people somehow – buy something, sell something, stand on one leg, hump that lamp post, kill your neighbour, claw off your own skin. I’d felt several such attempts today.”

Reality sometimes felt … thin. Like a worn curtain letting the light through. It made sense that somebody had been able to take advantage of that, weaponise its contradictions. In act I was surprised that I hadn’t encountered more people like him.

 So all in all an elegantly written and thought provoking read that mixes the fantastically absurd with the sharply observational.

The House on Utopia Way is due for publication end of June – you can find out more and pre-order HERE