A review by sadie_slater
The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man, Volume 1 by Dave Hutchinson

4.0

Dave Hutchinson's The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man is a rather strangely structured novel. Despite the pulp SF title, for the first three-quarters of the book it's a slow-build technothriller with shades of Twin Peaks. The hero, Alex Dolan, is a seriously underemployed freelance journalist whose life is turned upside down when he receives a letter from multibillionaire Stan Clayton, the fifth richest man in the world, offering him a job. Clayton has bought an entire county in northern Iowa and built a giant supercollider underneath the fields, and he wants Alex to write a book about it, something that will counteract the negative press the project has received to date. Despite some misgivings, Alex accepts the job and moves to Sioux Crossing, where he finds that however friendly and welcoming the locals are (with the exception of his deeply cantankerous next-door neighbour) he can't escape the sense that something strange is going on. And then, just as it starts to feel that Alex might finally be going to find some answers, Hutchinson flips everything on its head and the final 25% is a very different story, one that seems like a much better fit for the title. I found this a bit disconcerting, especially as the second part doesn't answer many of the questions posed in the first. (I gather that Hutchinson published a short story called 'The Incredible Exploding Man' a few years ago, and from the synoposis I think that may have been substantially similar to the final section of the novel, with the earlier part forming an origin story for the characters in the short story.)

Aside from the slightly odd structure, I really enjoyed this; it's generally lighter in tone than Hutchinson's Fractured Europe series, but shares its wryly humorous tone and is a similarly easy, plotty read with interesting and mostly likeable characters.

(Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free eARC for review.)