Pre-Pub Book Buzz: The Demi-Monde: Winter by Rod Rees

Ooh, I can't wait for this one! The Demi-Monde: Winter is the first in a series of four steampunk thrillers by Rod Rees. We're a bit behind the UK, who released this first installment a while ago. I believe book two, Spring, is already out there as well. At any rate, Winter hits shelves stateside on Tuesday, December 27 (just in time for those holiday gift cards!).

Here's what the publisher is saying:

In the Demi-Monde, author Rod Rees has conjured up a terrifying virtual reality, a world dominated by history’s most ruthless and bloodthirsty psychopaths—from Holocaust architect Reinhard Heydrich to Torquemada, the Spanish Inquisition’s pitiless torturer, to Josef Stalin’s bloodthirsty right-hand man/monster, the infamous Beria. The Demi-Monde: Winter kicks off a brilliant, high concept series that blends science fiction and thriller, steampunk and dystopian vision. If Neil Gaiman, Neal Stephenson, James Rollins, and Clive Cussler participated in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, the result might be something akin to the dark and ingenious madness of Rees’s The Demi-Monde: Winter.

And here's more:

The Demi-Monde:

1. A subclass of society whose members embrace a decadent lifestyle and evince loose morals.

2. A shadow world where the norms of civilized behavior have been abandoned.

3. A massive multiple-player simulation technology that re-creates in a wholly realistic cyber-milieu the threat-ambiance and no-warning aspects of a hi-intensity, deep-density, urban Asymmetric Warfare Environment.

4. Hell.

Welcome to the Demi-Monde, the ultimate in virtual reality—a military training ground and vivid, simulated world of cruelty and chaos run by psychopaths, madmen and fanatics.

If you die here, you die in the Real World . . .

In the year 2018, the Demi-Monde is the most sophisticated, complex and unpredictable computer simulation ever created, devised specifically to train soldiers for the nightmarish reality of urban warfare. A virtual world of eternal civil conflict, its thirty million inhabitants—“Dupes”—are ruled by cyber-duplicates of some of history’s cruelest tyrants: the fanatical Nazi butcher Reinhard Heydrich; Stalin’s arch executioner Lavrentii Beria; the torture-loving Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada; the Reign of Terror’s bloodthirsty mastermind Maximilien Robespierre.

But something has gone horribly wrong inside the Demi-Monde, and the U.S. president’s daughter, Norma, has been lured into this terrifying shadow world, only to be trapped there. Her last hope of rescue is Ella Thomas, an eighteen-year-old jazz singer and very reluctant heroine. But when Ella infiltrates the Demi-Monde and begins her hunt for Norma, she soon discovers the walls containing the evils of this simulated environment are dissolving—and the Real World is in far more danger than anyone knows. With the help of resistors determined to understand their world, Ella must race to save Norma and stop an apocalypse . . . but the clock is ticking.

Blending fact and fantasy, history and religion, military and existential themes, epic adventure and dark wit, dystopia and steampunk in a wholly original and driving narrative stream, The Demi-Monde: Winter is inventive fiction at its finest.

I'm totally stoked! I think this looks like one of the coolest books of the season!

You can visit the official site at the link above. Or you can visit Harper Collins's book page here and you can read a sample of the book here on Scribd.

I'm hitting the books. Hope you enjoy your Saturday!