I love Jeff Noon since reading Vurt many yars ago. His surreal books are in a class of their own. And this mystery is a great example of weird detective done right

Within Without is the 4th Nyquist SF/fantasy mystery by Jeff Noon. Released 11th May 2021 by Angry Robot, it's 373 pages and is available in paperback, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

This is such a very surreal and weird book. The writing is superb and the characters are clearly written - but the background scenery and settings so very surreal and dreamlike and written in such an unvarnished and realistic way as to instill a creeping sense of dread in the reader which just doesn't dissipate. It's not populated with jump scares in any way; the author dispassionately describes horrific scenes (free-floating disembodied skinlike "images" (enhancers) in liquid tubes for an example from the beginning of the book) completely deadpan without any sense of outrage - and it's supremely unsettling.

The mystery itself is very well constructed, precisely engineered and clever. The characters are (mostly) believable, and the dialogue is well written and never clunky or awkward (except where it's *clearly* meant to be such). Someone described it as Kafkaesque and I would agree with that assessment.

After reading the book, I'm not entirely sure if I actually *liked* it... but it intrigued me enough to go back and pick up the first three books in the series. Fans of China Mieville, Guillermo del Toro, and Mervyn Peake (and especially those who love all of the above) will find much to enjoy here. Cleverly written and constructed, it's weird and wonderful.

Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

This is the third “John Nyquist Mystery” I’ve read and it’s by far the weirdest. Nyquist’s latest case involves the theft of a sentient, essence-of-glamor image that has gone missing from its host. To investigate, Nyquist and his new assistant travel to the city of Delirium, guarded by boundaries that are far more than checkpoints or physical barriers. Their search for the magic practitioner who created and attached the image to begin with leads them into increasingly bizarre cities-within-cities. In Escher, Nyquist discovers his “Inverse,” the character hidden within his psyche, and it turns out to be Gregor Samsa, the narrator of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, who wakens one morning to discover he has turned into a cockroach. So Nyquist must deal not only with Samsa’s personality and voice, but that of the cockroach. As if that weren’t strange enough, his assistant has become infected with a creeping magical substance and, obsessed with taking the image, named Oberon, for his own, disappears. Plot twists abound, building until Nyquist finds himself in an utterly different plane of existence, one in which the images define and distort reality. The book carries forward and intensifies the hallucinatory texture of the previous Nyquist novels.

this was a great fourth chapter in this series, the characters were great and I enjoyed going through the storyline. The characters felt smart and I enjoyed the mystery.

Do you enjoy Sci-Fi that has no intention of behaving like traditional Sci-Fi? Belly up to the psychedelic salad bar, me loverlies. A detective has accepted an assigment which causes him to plunge into a quest. In comes the Mad Hatter. Each level he has to ascend has its own difficulties. Easter eggs are dropping like napalm in his footsteps. Lewis Carroll, Escher, HA! No more advance giveaways, children. Read it for yourselves, if you dare. My thanks to the author and NetGalley for a complimentary copy.

This is the fourth book in the series of weird fiction fantasy novels featuring the enquiry agent John Nyquist. Each book can be read as a standalone since each book takes you to a different world with different rules and there is no connection between them. However, I suggest that you start with one of the other books.

I have enjoyed the other books in the series, I guess I like weird. However, this book is truly WEIRD. Nyquist and his apprentice Teddy are hired to recover the image of a rock star. The image called Oberon, which was tacked on to the exterior of the rock star, has either run away or been stolen. The search for Oberon takes the detectives to Delirium, a world full of multitudes of borders, some only a few feet apart, some intersecting and some that are constantly shifting. “At one point they were encased by four different boundaries, one on each side of a crossroads. To the east was a fragile wall made of a giant sheet of crinkled paper, to the south a fence of corrugated steel, to the west a sturdy wooden gateway across a side-street, to the north a mass of people holding up placards marked with Xs to mark the borderline of a newly formed realm.”

In addition to images and borders, it turns out that everyone has an inverse self that is a literary character living inside of them. And then there are the entities with letters and symbols instead of feet who are stamping out stories. Honestly, the rules in this book changed from page to page. It was entirely too much for me and this was definitely my least favorite book of the series. If the author continues with the Nyquist series (not at all certain) I will read the next book, but I am hoping for a little less crazy next time.

This is a wild, trippy ride and I enjoyed every second of it immensely.

Private Detective John Nyquist and his assistant, Teddy, head into the border-filled town of Delirium to take on a case for actor Vince Craven. Craven needs Nyquist's help to locate his missing image - energy beings that layer over people and increase their charisma. The search for Craven's missing image, known as Oberon, leads Nyquist and Teddy through Delirium, crossing border after border and winding ever inward until they find their way to Escher, where a boundary within the mind threatens to break Teddy completely before Nyquist can find him. Facing conspiracies, threats to the fabric of Delirium, and more, Nyquist winds up in a race against time to stop it all before it's too late.

Noon creates a compelling and captivating world here. He builds Delirium so well within the text, its confusing nature clear to the reader as they join the characters on their journey. Another thing I found interesting was I didn't know this was a fourth book in a series until I was almost done with it, and I don't think reading it out of order detracted from the experience at all. I'm sure there are things I missed, not having met these characters before, but it also stood well on its own.

The gist: Never let it be said that Noon’s writing is anything less than the epitome of weird. After the events of Creeping Jenny, I thought perhaps Nyquist might get a bit of a rest, a bit of a holiday, a bit of anything that didn’t involve jumbling up all the pieces of his lived experience and then putting them back together the wrong way around while trying to solve crime and hopefully not die.
Sorry, Nyquist.
But this time Nyquist gets a friend along for the ride, Teddy, to share the burden.
Sorry, Teddy.
And it’s a reliably strange ride indeed, starting off with the weirdest queue (and hey, I’m British, I know about queues), taking a tour through Hollywood glamour, and ending up, well, you’ll see when you get there. There’s something about Noon’s writing that is physical—the way he takes you across the many borders in the book is dizzying. Some of the regions are claustrophobic while others feel like you’ve fallen through the wrong door at a midnight carnival, and probably shouldn’t have eaten those tasty looking mushrooms for breakfast. And all of this—all the mystery, all the glamour, all the crazy and chaotic places—draws you in until you wonder if you might be lost. And when you’re really lost, you start to wonder who you even are, and who you’ll be when you get back.
It’s weird, it’s thoughtful, and it’s a pretty crazy journey.
It’s Noon.
Favourite line: A creature of blur had taken occupation.
Read if: You want yet more weirdness and inventive detectivery (that is a word now) in the fourth instalment of the Nyquist series
Read with: Your passport cos you’re going places you’re just not sure where. It might also help you keep a handle on who you are.

Will be posting the review to www.thedustlounge.com

I have no idea what I just read—but I love it—but I love it. [with apologies to The Weeknd]

Within Without is unlike any other book I have ever read. It’s like Dark City, Tenet, and Alice in Wonderland had a baby. Then dropped that baby in a 6D black rabbit hole.

A noir detective named John Nyquist is searching for a client’s lost image. Like a living NFT stolen from blockchain. Sounds simple, right? It’s not. The first city John visits is Delirium. The city has border crossings everywhere. Was this Europe before the Union? Then, he finds an even stranger city called Escher.

Throughout the book are literary Easter eggs. This is a book that can be read again and again. Each time new insights will be found.

I love genre mashups. The erudite author of Within Without, Jeff Noon, is a master of it. This is a noir, science fiction and fantasy mashup. But its intelligence and wild, almost bizarro, feel, puts it into another category. If you liked Trainspotting, you will love the drugged feeling of the world built here. Okay, I give up. I just can’t explain this book in words.

My best advice is not read this book if you are looking for traditional noir. But do read it if you are looking for a book that will take you on a wild ride that follows few writing rules. But it still succeeds in pure entertainment. 5 stars and a favorite!

Thanks to Angry Robot and NetGalley for a copy in exchange for my honest review.

Within Without is the fourth instalment in Jeff Noon’s award-nominated and critically acclaimed Nyquist Mystery series. The year is 1960 and John Henry Nyquist and his ever-present assistant, Teddy Fairclough, decide to take on a case in the city of Delirium. In Delirium where the borders are legion and are constantly changing between the different parts of the city. They multiply and take various forms, from conventional barriers to guard posts, through magical barriers and human chains and people have frequently reported being trapped there forever. The constant reshuffling of the borders of Delirium leads to continuous redistributions of the city and crowd movements which constitute more or less foreign movements of tension and jubilation. Delirium's borders are material, but also magical, and can interact with individuals to mark them. Teddy, is, for example, "spotted" by the "Waxwane Gate", while the enchantress Lizzie Pursglove has many scars on her face from her travels across borders. Despite some natural reservations about visiting the area, Nyquist goes to meet new client Vince Craven, a popular and prominent movie star whose image, Oberon, has gone missing. Oberon’s spirit has somehow, in the grand scheme of things, managed to be involuntarily, or forcibly, removed from his body and now he is left without the vital part of himself he shows to the public.

The journey, as always with Noon, is a wildly unpredictable one and his books provide adults with that childlike mirth and excitement first felt when reading as a child. Can Nyquist and Fairclough retrieve Oberon from a mysterious and devilishly troublesome locale without ending up losing themselves in the process? This is a compulsive, captivating and wonderfully weird addition to the series with Noon’s precise, fascinating and thoroughly imaginative plotting and worldbuilding omnipresent. It's an entertaining and highly original thriller peopled by quirky, idiosyncratic characters that bring the narrative alive, and although I'm not usually a fan of the supernatural, here it never feels forced and holds your interest right from the beginning with all of the rich imagination that has gone into it and you know with Noon you will be getting a masterfully woven plot that is full of intricate detail, details that most other authors would ultimately neglect. The story works its way under your skin and the fantastical elements to it feel like taking a much-needed break from our stressful reality. Infused throughout are the appearances of famous literary characters and philosophical rumination, which I adored. Indeed, you never quite know what you're going to get with a Noon novel, but one thing you can invariably rely on him to do is to weave a magnificent, thoroughly unusual and intriguing read. Highly recommended to those into the avant-garde or looking for a unique piece of escapist literature.

Weird fiction by its very nature can be an acquired taste, but Jeff Noon has been putting out just the right kind of weird out there. I’m a huge fan of his John Nyquist series (and I don’t even like series) and was very excited to find book four out on Netgalley. I didn’t even read the plot summary, because I kind of had a pretty good idea of what to expect based on the first three books. And sure enough, expectations met. Another strange, exotic and completely bonkers world for Nyquist’s latest investigation.
This time it’s a world defined by its numerous boundaries, with every border delineating a new set of rules and social norms. There are also personality enhancing transplants that may or may not be sentient and literary characters residing in the attics of one’s mind. If it’s sounds completely wild and out there, it’s because it is. So much so it’s actually difficult to do justice describing, especially after reading Noon’s descriptions. And so I’ll just leave it at that.
Suffice it to say, Noon’s got a wildly prodigious imagination on a permanent overdrive setting and it results in some of the most spectacular worldbuilding speculative fiction has to offer.
And having that been said, I should also mention that this one didn’t quite wow me the way its predecessors did. I’m not completely sure why. Something about this world wasn’t as exciting as the others or maybe it just veered down too many too strange alleys. Or maybe I wasn’t entirely in the mood for it this time. To be fair, having just revisited my review of book three, this is much of the same reaction as I’ve had then. Madly loved first two and then not quite getting the same high with the last two. Still though, even if it isn’t love as such, there’s so much to appreciate here and the entire thing is just so original and different and wild that it’s absolutely worth a read. Not sure where it’s going to go after that ending, but trust Noon to come up with something awesome. After all, he’s really got a knack for it.
Strange, bizarre, trippy…what an adventure. There’s nothing like it out there, nothing to compare it to. Which is excellent in and of itself. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

The term “bordering on madness” is one everyone will be familiar with, and might well have used themselves without really thinking too much about it. Jeff Noon seems to have thought about it a lot though, if the peculiar nature of the city of Delirium is anything to go by. It’s a place of borders, varying in permeability and construction; some physical, some magical, some internalised, all winding their way through the city and the minds of its inhabitants. At a time when the topics of borders and mental health are on a lot of people’s minds, it’s a clever and timely marriage of two seemingly disparate themes. The theme of liminality, of the effect a border has on something’s state as it goes from being a thing that WAS there to a thing that IS here, makes for extremely fertile ground here.

There’s a wealth of interesting and entertaining ways Noon chooses to use his setup. The very first border that Nyquist crosses, for example, is the one into the city itself, and is in the form of an eery green mist known as Fontanelle. Taking its name from the soft spot in a baby’s skull, it perhaps implies that the only way to get to the city is to go out of one’s mind, or even that someone - or something - else’s mind has to be entered. There is as much mystery woven into the nature of the setting itself as there is in the plot, which sees Nyquist attempting to track down the missing sentient image of a film star (and is every bit as beguilingly strange as it sounds).

This investigation unfolds through what feels almost like a series of vignettes - although given the nature of the setting, perhaps “episodes” is a more appropriate term - which vary considerably in their tone. Encounters with the strange inhabitants of the city make up plenty of them, as do struggles with borders, and there are amusing moments of farce, chilling encounters that test Nyquist’s sanity and bouts of introspective questioning to stretch his mental fortitude to its limits. While that might seem like it might lack cohesion, this isn’t the case at all - Delirium is a modern-day Wonderland, with gleefully madcap moments sitting comfortably side by side with body horror and witchcraft.

Accompanying Nyquist on his investigation is newcomer Teddy Fairclough, last seen in previous novel Creeping Jenny, and whose backstory is recapped with laudable brevity. He’s a welcome and likeable presence, with the two playing off each other well; Teddy is bright-eyed and keen, whilst Nyquist is the world-weary gumshoe who really has seen it all. Certainly in the earlier part of the story, the feeling of isolation that Nyquist has had to contend with before is less of an issue thanks to Teddy’s presence, and for all that Nyquist chides him (and himself, for bringing him along), it’s clear from the start how important the younger man is to him.

With his now customary skill, Jeff Noon has once again turned the detective novel on its head whilst simultaneously turning it inside out. Within Without is yet another unique prospect from a mind replete with off the wall ideas and engaging premises, and is sure to please fans and baffle unsuspecting newcomers in the best way possible.

My thanks to Angry Robot and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this science fiction novel.

Jeff Noon continues the adventures of John Nyquist, private eye, in the fourth book of the series Within Without. The title is a pun, maybe, a clue possibly, for the tale which involves a famous singer actor in the 1960's hiring Nyquist to find a missing person, the actor's missing image. Nyquist and his sidekick travel to the town of Delirium to begin the search. And everything from the start goes weird.

The book is filled with allusions and illusions, literary and sensory. The characters are a pastiche of the cast in a film noir, the actor who's not telling all he knows, the nightclub singer with secrets, the mysterious importer, magicians and others. The story goes in places that you don't expect nor even thought to expect. The book has a rhythm that might be hard to find, but patience and knowing that what is odd early is nothing to what is coming later. The writing, the imagination, the ideas poured onto paper and formed into this book just make you want to keep reading.

If you've read any of my other reviews of Jeff Noon's John Nyquist series, you already know that these books are really unlike anything else.

John Nyquist is a detective who takes on the oddest jobs - or the oddest jobs find him. In either case, Nyquist goes to the most unusual, mind-bending, confusing communities to bring a small sense of order to the disorder around him.

In two of my three previous reviews of Noon's book, I compare Noon's worlds with the worlds of Franz Kafka's work. In case the comparisons weren't obvious enough for some, Noon introduces Nyquist to a resident of this new world by the name of Gregor Samsa who is in the process of turning into a beetle. We'll also meet Alice Liddell and Mr. Hyde. If you don't know who any of these people are, you can just skip this review and this book.

The locations have been every bit as much a character as the people in Noon's books and that is still true here. Nyquist is in the city of Delirium and in the center of Delirium is a town called Escher. ("That's right. Escher is a town within Delirium.")

Nyquist's quest here is to help pop movie star Vince Craven. Craven has lost his image. Doesn't quite make sense? Yeah, that's a Jeff Noon book. Trust the author - he'll make it work.

Opening a Jeff Noon book makes me feel like a kid again. I wasn't even a full page in when I realized I was grinning widely and absolutely giddy with excitement. Noon puts Nyquist, and the reader, into a unique situation and describes it so completely we feel we are there. He gives us a situation that we can't help but know we're in for something unusual. A packed corridor with slow, steady movement but no one seeming to have a destination.

"Wait for it. Wait. It's almost four o'clock. Wait, wait! Any second now..." an individual in the crowd tells Nyquist. Then:


A great cry went up, all along the line from both directions, every traveller shouting out at once, in one voice: "We are the queue!" ... the cry came again, even louder now: "We ARE the queue!" ... and then the cry a third time.

"WE ARE THE QUEUE!" ...


And then the fellow tells Nyquist, "Every two hours on the hour, we need to assert ourselves, our place in the world, our glory."

Noon's writing is just brilliant and we appreciate Nyquist, our Everyman, who takes everything unusual in stride which is why we the reader are comfortable moving forward in this unusual world - if Nyquist can go on, so can we.

And what is it about British authors that they come up with some of the best character names?

Her name was Dandelion. Dandelion Applegood. ... Dandelion was a woman with a blue shadow. Sometimes entirely blue, but often speckled with tiny silver stars.
I'd love to go on and share everything I highlighted in the book, but it would be a lot easier if you just go ahead and read it for yourself.

Mr. Noon, to quote John Nyquist: "I enjoyed having you inside my head."

Looking for a good book? If you pick up Jeff Noon's Within Without, you've found it.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Jeff Noon has been one of my favorite writers ever since his debut novel Vurt came out in 1993. Recently, Noon has been writing a series of surreal detective mysteries, focusing on his detective figure, John Nyquist. Each volume places Nyquist in a different bizarre setting, and the novels are more about their mind-blowing environments than they are about plot or character. It is less a matter of solving a case for Nyquist, than of soaking up the environment like a sponge, and being twisted into strange new shapes as a result. I reviewed the first Nyquist novel, A Man of Shadows, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2073665192">here on goodreads</a>. It was set in a city, one half of which is always brightly illuminated daytime; the other half of which is always dark and nocturnal. The second Nyquist book, The Body Library, was set in a Borgesian city of words; the third, Creeping Jenny, in a British small town where the inhabitants performed different bizarre rituals for each day of the year.

Within Without, the fourth Nyquist novel, takes place in the cities of Delirium, a place of multiple borders, and Escher, where everybody is inhabited by literary characters (Gregor Samsa, Edward Hyde, Alice) who seek to engulf and control them. In Delirium, you cannot go two blocks without being held up by a barrier, subject to bureaucratic scrutiny, searched, and compelled to show your passport and perhaps slip a bribe to the border guards. In Escher, which seems to be a pocket inside Delirium, life seems to consist in a series of drunken gatherings and masquerades; everyone is constantly muttering to themselves -- or rather, their muttering is not themselves really, but the literary characters hidden within them and who seek to escape. Escher itself leads to the ultimate border, separating the Yeald, separating the world we know from a mirror realm in which the constant rustle of language will drive you crazy, unless you are somehow shielded by one of the Sentine, the native inhabitants, who are able to filter this endless language into the coherence of stories.

A border, like a biological membrane, both separates and joins. It keeps the outside away, but also offers a path by which the outside can come insde. When the Sentines, the inhabitants of the realm beyond, the realm of pure language, cross over into the everyday world, they become beautiful images, creatures of pure glamour. Magicians are able to attach these images to physical bodies; and the people with these attachments become pop stars, with irresistible charisma. But the Sentines also have wills of their own, and they do not always enjoy being so attached...

By summarizing the book's premises in this way, I fear I am making it seem more schematic than it actually is. To the extent that subgenre distinctions are useful at all within speculative fiction, Within Without seems to me to really be science fiction (rather than either a mystery novel or some sort of fantasy or magic realism), precisely because its underpinnings turn out to involve this underlying and fairly rigorous logic of personalities composed of insides and outsides, internal voices and external coverings, all of which are mapped onto regions of a carefully delineated space. But all this is a retrospective reconstruction, which I was only able to work out (and I have merely given the barest outline here) after finishing the novel. It is sort of a secret structure, grounding what otherwise would seem to be the sheerest extravagance.

That is to say, the process of reading the novel does not feel schematic or predetermined at all. Rather, from page to page the experience is one of dizzying twists and turns. You have a sense of pure delirium (as the novel itself instructs us, with the name of its first city). The narration is in the third person, and sticks closely to Nyquist's point of view. And despite being a detective, Nyquist is passive and mostly clueless, as he stumbles from one crazy, destabilizing encounter to the next. The book reads like a cross between the metafictional displacements and linguistic games of Noon's evidently favorite authors (Kafka, Borges, Lewis Carroll; perhaps Calvino as well) and the roller coaster peaks and dips of an LSD trip (neither a bad trip nor a good, ecstatic one, but rather a lateral series of disorienting torsions and shifts). And all this is conveyed in dazzling prose: Noon's style is rich and overloaded, though in a way that retains enough of its pulp/genre roots to ever become obliquely experimental. I think that one of the reasons I love to read Noon's novels is precisely -- if I can put things this way -- how literary it actually is, without ever feeling "literary" (in the conventional and -- to me -- pejorative sense).

All in all, Within Without summarizes the themes and the feelings of much of Jeff Noon's work throughout his career (going back to his early masterpieces Vurt and Pollen). It both both offers the reader a wild and unpredictable ride, AND slyly proposes a sort of sciencefictional model of the psyche in an age of celebrities and incessant media distraction.

The John Nyquist series is extremely inventive: the subject matter is the matter is stories itself, the genre is noir mystery and fantasy and this latest installment really divides into those two genres. The first half sees our hard-boiled detective following leads to break open his latest case in a new and bizarre cityscape. Noon is not concerned with world-building but rather city-building and the urban landscapes he creates are dark, warped and mysterious and Delirium is no less any of these.

The second half slips into more of a fantasy land led by magical rituals. With this change, we see less dialogue and more stream of consciousness style narration, which really takes the reader inside the crazy world Nyquist has landed himself in.

This installment of the Nyquist mysteries had a lot more action and traditional detection in it which I enjoyed. I enjoyed the second half less so but overall this was yet another wild twist in the takes of Nyquist, demonstrating Noon's innovation with plot, story and genre.

This author write weird books!! This is the fourth book on a really strange and unique series. It's hard to explain, but this is an experience in itself! Try it, keep and open mind and I think you'll be please!

A fabulous book. A heady mix of genres, including science fiction, fantasy and noir, this is better than the previous Nyquist novels. I didn't think it possible but Noon manages it very, very well. There are many literary influences on show here - including Peake, Kafka, Chandler and even some Mieville - and yet, through a style all of his own, Noon gives some entirely new and exciting. At times experimental, this fits in with the character and the writer. Read this. Read it now.

An incredible book, and I'll be waiting on the next.

Within Without est le quatrième tome des enquêtes de John Nyquist.
Jeff Noon confronte son détective de l’étrange et son ami Teddy Fairlough aux villes de Delirium et Escher, où les frontières sont vivantes, mouvantes et chargées de magie, et où des personnages littéraires s’éveillent dans l’esprit des individus. Ils sont chargés par l’acteur Vince Craven de retrouver son image, c’est-à-dire la créature surnaturelle qui augmente son charisme et son charme avec laquelle il vit en symbiose et qu’on lui a supposément dérobé.
La quête de cette image, appelée Oberon, et l’expérience de Delirium et d’Escher marquent les deux personnages au fer rouge, physiquement et psychiquement, en les faisant voyager jusqu’aux frontières de leur propre monde, matériel comme mental.
Si vous aimez la plume de Jeff Noon et les enquêteurs du surnaturel, je vous recommande chaudement ce roman !

The wizard of weird, Jeff Noon, in his fourth Nyquist mystery, provides a fun romp through Delrium, a portal to an infinite number of strange lands that are inhabited by ghosts, magicians, supernatural entities and literary characters including Alice in Wonderland and Mr. Hyde. This was a well written and easy to read novel. I highly recommend this novel and all the other novels