Deadstock sets two gripping narrative lines on a collision course. The first features Jeremy Stake, a haunted veteran of the Blue War (an interdimensional conflict featuring a blue-skinned race of humanoids that is meant to suggest the Vietnam War) who now works as a private investigator. The other focuses on Javier Dias, the leader of a vicious street gang known as the Folger Street Snarlers. Javier is in his 20s, a little past the prime of a gang leader, and wondering what the future holds for him.

That turns out to be, in no particular order: death, terror and love. Following a missing gang member, Javier leads his people into an abandoned apartment building at the center of Punktown, a building patrolled by murderous belfs—"bio-engineered life forms." Trapped inside, Javier and his gang, along with members of another gang, this one made up of mutants, must put aside their differences and work together to overcome whatever is driving the belfs.

Meanwhile, Stake is on the trail of another belf—a girl's doll called Dai-oo-ika, which means "great king of the squid." Oo-kay. This cute little bundle of squidly joy has vanished, perhaps stolen by an envious girl, but the ersatz organism turns out to have a mind, and an appetite, of its own ...

The two narrative lines intersect in the apartment building where the Snarlers are battling for their lives ... and, as it turns out, for the survival of humanity.

Forget it, Stake—it's Punktown

Punktown is not wholly Thomas' demesne; it's a shared world that's been contributed to in the past by a number of writers, including his brother, Scott. But he seems to know it better than any other, and he is the perfect tour guide to a city as dangerous and beguiling as Jeff Vandermeer's Ambergris and China Miéville's Bas-Lag. Like these authors, linked now past all protestation with the New Weird, Thomas combines tropes from horror, fantasy and science fiction in his work. His distinctive blend results in a mutant mash-up of H.P. Lovecraft, Bruce Sterling and Blade Runner, a slow-motion apocalypse of gritty surrealism and future schlock limned by a stark noir vision of damaged souls scrabbling for whatever shreds of honor and dignity remain to them ... and those are the good guys.

Thomas is a the kind of writer a mainstream critic might attempt to compliment by stating that he "transcends his schlocky material." But the fact of the matter is, Thomas wallows in the schlock. He gets down and dirty in it. And thank God, or Dai-oo-ika, for that. Because what he connects with is not only the chilly terror of Lovecraft's bleak inhuman vision but a contrapuntal humanity (so notably absent from much of Lovecraft's fiction) that both deepens the horror and allows some glimmer of hope, even redemption, in the midst of it. And factors in the cost of hope as well, and the cost of love, too. Stake memorably exemplifies all these characteristics. He is a mutant with a condition known as Caro turbida, or "confused flesh," in which his features mold themselves into those of anyone he stares at for a sufficient length of time. This is obviously a useful tool for a private eye, but Thomas shows the futility as well as the utility of Stake's "gift," and without straining makes it work on a metaphorical level that enriches our perceptions not only of Stake but of the world he inhabits.

What cost Deadstock a full A grade is the ending, wherein Thomas' grip on his dual narratives grows a bit too tight, too controlling, and events are rushed together or elided over in ways that call unwelcome attention to the man at the keyboard. Still, though I found this annoying (and disappointing), it didn't lessen my admiration of Thomas' superb achievement here.