It begins in Toronto, in the years after the smart drug revolution. Any
high school student with a chemjet and internet connection can download
recipes and print drugs, or invent them. A seventeen-year-old street
girl finds God through a new brain-altering drug called Numinous, used
as a sacrament by a new Church that preys on the underclass. But she is
arrested and put into detention, and without the drug, commits suicide.
Lyda Rose, another patient in that detention facility, has a dark
secret: she was one of the original scientists who developed the drug.
With the help of an ex-government agent and an imaginary, drug-induced
doctor, Lyda sets out to find the other three survivors of the five who
made the Numinous in a quest to set things right.
A mind-bending and violent chase across Canada and the US, Daryl
Gregory's Afterparty is a marvelous mix of William Gibson's
Neuromancer, Philip K. Dick's Ubik, and perhaps a bit of Peter
Watts's Starfish a last chance to save civilization, or die trying.