Welcome to Punktown, a swarthy, seedy catchall of an outpost city on the planet Oasis where many of the worst elements of humanity and dozens of sentient races eventually end up. Anything goes in Punktown. It’s the perfect place for a low rent kind of guy like Jeremy Stake to ply the trade of private investigation. As the novel opens Stake has just landed a new assignment in the form of the retrieval of a precious item for the daughter of a wealthy CEO.

John Fukuda, the one who has hired Stake, specializes in the creation and distribution of the product known as deadstock, food animals such as cows and chickens which have been altered to grow without brains, or even heads. Deadstock function purely as raw foodstuffs to be processed and served quickly and easily without the moral ambiguities that may come with the slaughter of living things. Fukuda explains to Stake that he has adapted this technology to create a one-of-a-kind organic doll for his daughter, Yuki. The doll, named Dai-oo-ika, Great King of Squid, by Yuki, is a small, gray, vaguely humanoid thing with no features save for a cluster of quivering tentacles in place of a mouth. It is the suspicion of both Fukuda and Yuki that the doll was purloined by a jealous classmate at the all-female private school Yuki attends.

So, Stake begins searching for clues, interviewing staff and students at the school, but also following his own intuition by checking leads on Fukuda’s competitors. Stake is of the mind that , being a unique creation, the doll may have actually been lifted by a business rival looking to figure out how it was made. Predictably, he discovers that Fukuda has not been entirely truthful with him and comes to realize the true nature of Dai-oo-ika.

To its credit, Deadstock does not take itself all that seriously and so it’s easy to enjoy it as a result . The novel is a veritable mixed grill of genre influences: sci-fi action piece, horror thriller and detective story, all with a fine coat of sleaze, as befits the setting. And though it may be sleazy it, at least, does not revel in it too much.

At times, though, the treatment of these genre influences is clichéd and heavy-handed. A veteran of an inter-dimensional conflict known as the Blue War, Jeremy Stake is the de facto grizzled, hardboiled investigator of the pulp novels: living in a grungy apartment, pickling his liver with cheap libations and clogging his arteries with greasy food while cultivating an affinity for the wrong type of women. Also, some of the twists seem more reminiscent of a Lifetime Movie of the Week than a sci-fi novel. There are a few 11 th hour saves as well which don’t ring true.

The revelation of the true nature of Dai-oo-ika, while certainly a fun and interesting twist, comes as no great surprise given that all of the evidence is laid out beforehand. The climax is also abrupt and wraps up everything too neatly in the face of the apocalyptic references and build-up throughout the rest of the novel. A final criticism is that Jeffrey Thomas’ phrasing is odd and repetitive at times and he seems occasionally to focus too much on extraneous, physical details.

All of this is not to suggest that I disliked Deadstock in any way. On the contrary, I enjoyed it immensely. It’s a great, unassuming piece of pleasure reading, perfect for anyone who is not in the mood for anything deep. But it’s still just fluff. It’s not going to win any awards and it’s not going to be held up in comparison to any of the greatest works of literature of our time.