Esc & Ctrl by Steve Hollyman Review

In 2012, someone broke into Steve Hollyman’s flat and stole a manuscript he was working on. 9 years later, a mysterious academic called Ike A. Mafar contacts Steve to say he’s come into possession of his lost book - except someone has added pages to it. Someone with intimate knowledge of Steve’s life - but who? Steve and Ike go through the manuscript looking for clues to try and find out.

I really like the premise of Steve Hollyman’s novel Esc & Ctrl - and it is all made-up, despite one of the characters being the author; none of the above happened - and the style of it. The way it’s presented is clever, fresh, imaginative - but I found the substantial part of the book, that being the book-within-the-book, significantly lacking and failing to be as compelling as the setup.

The novel has multiple layers: there’s the original manuscript, the added chapters, and the footnotes, all of which have different fonts to help identify which part is which. Despite this, it’s still hard to understand what’s happening in the novel. One character wakes up in New York with no memory of how he got there or the past week and is trying to get in touch with someone called The Voice, who calls him sporadically on the phone. One character is in Manchester, England, setting up online profiles to stalk a woman called Emily. How are these connected and why? I never really understood, or where they were timeline-wise, which only makes for an increasingly less engaging read until I didn’t really care about anything that was happening, long before the end.

The chatty footnotes are a novel flourish to begin with but Ike’s pedantic academic notes become tedious very quickly and add little to the novel besides constantly reminding the reader of the story’s framing. Some of the footnotes suggest a more interesting story at play with events in the manuscript happening to the two reviewing the manuscript - a phone rings in the novel, a phone rings in the real world; nobody speaks to either when it’s answered - but these are few and far between.

Besides being confusing, neither of the manuscripts are especially compelling, lacking any real narrative drive. The main characters in both tend to sit around and/or repeat actions for the most part until the ending. And, without giving away details, it’s not a great ending. If you don’t know what it’s building up to or why, you’re hardly on the edge of your seat. The finale only underlines further how underdeveloped and flimsy the main story was - having only vaguely sketched out characters and plot - and anything that relies on anagrams for a reveal feels cheesy to me.

I’m not sure what the novel was about or what we were meant to take away from it. It seems like a circular, self-contained book, almost like a literary Mobius strip, that exists for its own sake. Which is still clever in itself but as a novel you’re left wanting a satisfying story to accompany the gimmicks.

And that’s ultimately the biggest failing of metafiction: the output tends to be all sizzle and no steak. Esc & Ctrl is a laudably ambitious, unusual and creative novel - structurally anyway - though the awkwardly-executed half-baked murder mystery/cerebral horror is unimpressive, boring and forgettable.