City of Angles (chapter one: "Starting Out Sideways")

This review was commissioned by @Qwertystop


"City of Angles" is a web serial, since republished as a novel trilogy, by Stefan Gagne. The first chapters went online in 2013, and the series was completed over the following couple of years. The author apparently did some video game writing a while back (he was involved in Neverwinter Nights II, among other titles), and has also published a few other webnovels, but nothing I've personally encountered.


To summarize "City of Angles" in brief, it's...hard to describe in brief lol. It's an urban fantasy horror story whose dark and grim events are written in a dissonantly comedic tone. It's not that the things that happen in the story are funny. It's not a comedy. The humor is all just in the descriptions and the third person narration's turns of phrase. It's more like a serious adventure-horror being transcribed by a standup comedian who hasn't quite figured out how to switch gears.

Or...okay, I've got it. Imagine if Douglas Adams wrote "Neverwhere." Yeah. I think that's more or less right.

Protagonist Dave Smith is certainly written like a millennial Arthur Dent. At least, at first. Comically mediocre, down-on-his-luck graphic designer, with no backbone and not enough ambition to even think about trying to grow one. Over the course of the first chapter though, we get increasing signs that what we're looking at isn't a whitebread blando after all, but a once very imaginative and artistic young man who's been crushed into a compact square by a combination of mental illness, isolation from his ever-shrinking family, and just having his hopes and dreams crushed so many times over that he's lost the will to have them anymore. There's no "big reveal" moment that recontextualizes Dave. The story just plays him as an Adamsian buffoon in the initial impression, and then slowly undermines that impression with sprinkled details and anecdotes, most of them framed humorously despite not really being funny at all without the witty retelling.

At the chapter's start, there are also only subtle hints of wrongness in the description of Dave's surroundings. Depression and social anxiety (both buried under a carefully nurtured band-aid of buffoonish apathy) have kept him inside of his efficiency apartment for several days uninterrupted. At some point during this shut-in streak, Dave was sucked into another dimension without realizing it. His mattress has been "growing U-shaped," without any explanation for how it could be doing that while still laying against a box frame. There's an offhand mention of his keychain having four keys on it, for his apartment, his dad's house, and his old dorm room. His digital clock reads "88:88" except when he's looking directly at it. Etc. His only interactions with the outside world have been online, and even his internet interactions have been getting increasingly "off." In particular, the corporate logo he's been working on keeps getting sent back to him with instructions to make it more and more complicated these last several days, even though it already looks like an MC Escher activity book maze.

He gets snapped out of it when a gruff, violent man and his happy-go-lucky teenaged daughter get chased into Dave's apartment by a horrific, reality-warping abomination that they call a "Picasso." When the creature mutates his door into a fractal flower-petal mass of miniature doors and broken locks just by banging on it, Dave is forced to flee along with them through the fire escape. At which point he realizes that the sky is a flat surface hanging ten feet above the roof of his building with the clouds just painted on, and that all the other structures in his city are oriented on different gravitational planes from his own.

What ensues is a roller coaster of twists, turns, and well-telegraphed (if dissonantly humorous in their setup and payoff) subversions that somehow packs a novella's worth of content into just one 17k word chapter. More happens than I can properly summarize in a review of this length; just take it for granted that if those opening plot beats sound interesting to you, there's a hell of a lot more where they came from.

Somehow, even though it continues to make you laugh at things you feel bad for laughing at, the story manages to never feel meanspirited. The humor is mocking, but the tone of it is more self-deprecating than demeaning. Like the characters are laughing at themselves through the third person narration, and inviting you to join them in this. It's hard to describe.

One factor that helps with this is the story's strong, pervading themes of empathy and mercy even under conditions where people are incentivized to be their worsts. Exemplified by the scene in which - after realizing that the "Picasso" chasing them is a horribly reality-distorted girl scout who doesn't realize she'll spread her infection to them on contact - Dave defies the two more experienced fugitives (Gregory and Penelope) telling him to run or fight and tries just telling her that he'll buy her cookies. And it works.

Gregory and Penelope have been living in this warped "City of Angles" for decades, and making scavenging trips into the monster-haunted "sideways" regions of it for years. And seemingly, neither they nor any of their other fellow survivalists ever tried doing this. Or, if they did try, it didn't work in those cases.

The story takes the same approach to the monsters that it does to the schlubby protagonist. Acknowledging their scariness or dorkiness, and evoking the relevant emotions in the reader, but still having empathy for them and never forgetting that these are thinking, feeling people who were turned into what they are now by truly horrible circumstances.

The chapter ends on an even wilder kind-of-subversion, after Gregory and Penelope have brought Dave back to the region of the City inhabited by lost humans and their descendants and he starts trying to integrate into their ramshackle society. Who exactly is supposed to have been exchanging emails with Dave and giving him increasingly bizarre graphic design orders, back at the beginning? How was there still an internet for him to connect to? It turns out that the City of Angles isn't just a mindless, geometry-warped reality malfunction like most people think it is, and that it brought Dave specifically into itself for a reason. The story doesn't call attention to these contradictions. The characters never have reason to notice them. It just sets them up, and lets the enfolding events be the payoff.

If "City of Angles" has a weakness, it's in the expository bits. One sequence in particular, involving a conversation between Gregory and an old pal of his, has such a bad case of "as you all know" that you could use it as a teaching example of what not to do. When the author isn't filling the reader in an complicated background information though, he's amazingly consistent in both tone and prose quality.


Based on the first chapter, I strongly recommend this story, flawed though it occasionally is.