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Mind Games is the debut urban fantasy novel — the first of a trilogy — by Carolyn Crane, someone well known to the online romance community for her irreverent blog, The Thrillionth Page.  I received an advance copy from Carolyn (Mind Games will be released this Tuesday, March 23). Click on the image of the cover for excerpts, other reviews, and purchase info.

Mind Games is not romance, but it has strong romantic elements. I found it fresh, exciting, thought-provoking, mordantly funny, scary, and sexy. I absolutely loved this book.

There are so many genuine surprises in this book, from very early on, that it is hard to even know what counts as a spoiler. I have done my very best not to give anything away that in my opinion could diminish readers’ enjoyment of it.

Mind Games is set in Midcity, a congested, decaying city terrorized by a crime wave that began eight years prior to the action of the novel. Midcity at first seems very much like any contemporary US city, but Crane disperses cues throughout the book that add up to a complete and believable alternate urban fantasy world. The most significant difference is the presence of “highcaps”, humans with unusual cognitive powers, including standard fare fantasy abilities like telepathy, telekinesis, and memory erasing (“revisioning”), but also unusual choices like  “medical intuitionists”. As the book opens, our heroine, Justine Jones, is talking over lunch at the Mongolian Delites restaurant, with her boyfriend Cubby, who doesn’t believe highcaps exist, which is the official position of the authorities as well. But Midcity has been terrorized lately by an individual known as “the Brickslinger”, whom Justine believes is a telekinetic.

“Brickslinger” sounds goofy, doesn’t it?  And it is — one example of the quirky dark humor that permeates the book. But as we  see adults rushing in to their apartments to avoid getting hit, deserted ball fields and playgrounds, and children wearing helmets to school, it’s clear that “Brickslinger” is a perfect symbol for the social instability, urban decay, and random horror that grips Midcity.

Justine suffers from an extreme form of hypochondria. And since Mind Games is not only written in the first person, but in the first person present, you as the reader are sucked right in to her mental illness. Midcity has its own set of dread diseases, such as Vein Star Syndrome, the one that killed Justine’ mother, and which she fears most. I totally enjoyed Justine, but she is not a heroine for everyone. She is morbidly funny, smart, courageous, and resourceful, but she is breathtakingly narcissistic and selfish. Justine’s hypochondria negatively affects her life in every conceivable way, including interfering with her relationship with Cubby, an average Joe whom she refers to as her “aspirational boyfriend”.  Justine’s hypochondria was narrated in an entirely believable and gripping way. It makes her subject to constant self-doubt and second guessing (is this just a headache? Or something worse?). Especially chilling was Justine’s concomitant awareness that she is a hypochondriac, an awareness that could not prevent her from engaging in self-destructive behaviors like marathon web searches for symptoms or quick trips to the ER.

It’s Justine’s mental illness that attracts Sterling Packard, ruggedly handsome proprietor of Mongolian Delites (there’s a fascinating story there), who recruits her for his team of “disillusionists”. Packard has the ability to see psychic structures and detect psychological weaknesses. He can also absorb others’ weaknesses, leaving them temporarily free from them. He teaches Justine how to “push her awareness out through her energy dimension”, otherwise known as “zinging”, to rid herself of her hypochondria by giving it to someone else. All of the disillusionists’ power comes from their own illnesses in this way, whether it is anger issues, gambling addiction, or intense pessimism. We get a phenomenology of this stuff, not a detailed, exact science, and there’s a lumping together of mental illnesses and personality quirks, which worked for me.

The disillusionists (a small collection of well drawn, unique secondary characters) are hired by victims of crimes, who want a kind of revenge which the police cannot offer. Packard uses his skills to determine a target’s weaknesses. He then sends in those disillusionists who can best work together to break him down and “reboot” him. Packard convinces Justine that she can live a life free of fear, as well as help change people for the better. Since all Justine longs for is a “normal life”, the offer is irresistible. There’s an interesting kind of Platonism at work here: the underlying assumption is that evil doers are suffering under an illusion, mistaking the bad for the good. Packard contends that disillusioning, while a vigilante effort, is much more effective at rehabilitation than prison.

Here’s an excerpt from when Justine first meets Packard:

Some men are handsome in a sculptural, symmetrical way, but the restaurateur’s good looks come from imperfection: bumpy, maybe  once-broken nose, crudely shaped lips, a sort of  rough-and-tumble allure you can feel sure as gravity.

“Forget him.” He draws closer, and I become acutely aware of my pulse pounding. “I want to talk about what I can do for you, and what you can do for me.”

“I’m fine, thanks,” I say. “My boyfriend and I are just finishing up.”

“You’re fine?” He looks at me hard— looks into me, it seems. “What about the vein star problem?”

How does he know? “What about it?” I ask.

He smiles, all radiant  self- possession. “I’m the one who can cure you.”

“Cure me of what? Anxiety or vein star syndrome?”

“Both. I can give you your life back.”

I regard him carefully. He has to be a highcap. My guess is he read my thoughts back there and wants to con me. Still, I have to ask. “What’s the something I do for you?”

“You’d work for me.”

“Doing what?”

“Does it matter? Is there anything you wouldn’t do to be free?”

I know a Faustian proposition when I hear one. “A lot of things. I’m not that desperate.”

“You were desperate ten minutes ago. You’ll be desperate again.” He fixes on my eyes. Slow smile. He’s like this handsome maniac.

“I’m used to desperate, buddy. Desperate’s my factory default. But thanks anyway.”

I felt that the high level of psychological insight and inventiveness and terror in this book was its greatest strength, and that extends to its moral psychology. Justine often wonders what the right thing is to do, what qualities a “good guy” has, and what mix of motivations is morally ok. When a disillusionist “zings” a target, she experiences a period of not just freedom from her own mental illness, but intense joy, known as ‘”the glory hour”. How strongly can a disillusionist look forward to the glory hour before what she is doing is less about making the world a better place and more about experiencing personal nirvana? This is a book that makes good on the urban fantasy promise of postmodern moral ambiguity. It presents very clearly the ongoing, neverending struggle of figuring out what to do and motivating yourself to do it, and seriously questions whether the struggle is winnable at all.

This would be enough for a whole book in some less skilled writer’s hands. But Mind Games not only brings us along on Justine’s first few hair raising disillusioning efforts, but offers a very compelling overarching story arc having to do with Packard’s history, his ulterior motives, and his mysterious powerful nemesis. Justine and Packard are drawn to each other, and their relationship generates all the sexual tension and excitement a romance reader would want, but he betrays her again and again … or are they really betrayals? Crane’s use of first person narration keeps us in suspense as to who is good and who isn’t for much of the book. Things get especially complicated, and a triangle ensues, when Justine goes after her final target, The Engineer, a man to whom both she and Packard have some kind of personal interest, an interest which may be tainting their view of him … or not. There are a few sexual scenes in the book which I would say are  of “medium level explicitness” from a romance reader’s point of view.

I think this is an amazingly polished debut, but it is not a perfect book. At a few points in the middle, there was some repetitiveness. Also, there are a couple of things that I would love to see more fully developed in the next book. For example, the moral status of high caps. Are we to assume they are dangerous merely because they have greater powers than normal humans?  Is theirs, then, a kind of evil that is not about illusion? Finally, and this is something that may be less of a complaint than an observation: there is no mention in the book, IIRC, of the mental health profession. Aren’t there therapies or drugs for people with anger issues, hypochondria, or depression in Midcity, and if not, why not? The absence was slightly jarring since the world in which we live today is so thoroughly saturated with mental health discourse.

But those are minor niggles. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I can’t wait for the next one.