Occasionally a book comes along that is the perfect storm of originality, great artwork, memorable characters and mind blowing story. This is… almost that book.

What stands Mushroom Blues out is its unique world built in symbiosis with fungi biology. Whilst the history of the land never fully explored outside of its war with humanity - presumably to allow some wiggle room in future books - it’s certainly an original idea and it’s clear the author has spent considerable time researching fungi biology and characteristics and transferring them into a sentient race and their building structures.

The bulk of the story is a police procedural where our human protagonist - Detective Henrietta Hoffman - and her fungal assistant Officer Nameko Koji are tracking down the murderers of native children in the city, whilst exploring the backdrop of a civilisation colonised almost to the brink of destruction by the ravages of imperialism. There are natural comparisons to Alien Nation here, but with a much darker and more disturbing setting. Also seeing the way the chemistry evolved between Hoffman and Koji was one of my favourite things about the story as they approached the investigation so differently - one with compassion and one with redemption and a devotion to the law in mind.

Koji though is the star of the show here, acting as the moral compass to the more complex, jaded and broken spirit of Hoffman and her journey from hating and fearing the mushroom society, to embracing it. In fact Koji and some of his mushroom brethren provide the only nuanced characters that are sadly lacking in the one dimensional humans (outside of Hoffman) who inhabit Neo Kinoko. Part of this issue is compounded by the cliched oriental culture Vs cliched western culture it leans too heavily into, without trying to create more unique and interesting identities.

Descriptions of the world are vivid and tangible and you can often feel and smell this dark, dank world. There’s a real sense of revulsion and claustrophobia from Gibson’s writing that helps identify with Hoffman’s phobias. It did get a little repetitive after a while reading the same descriptions of fungal structures after a while though.

The biggest letdown though is the story itself. A strong start descends into predictability, cliche and few surprises given the originality of the world, with flat antagonists who fail to convince as suitable foils for our leads. Some moments of shocking body horror, abuse and decent (albeit rapid) character development in Hoffman are just enough to offset it, but it made reading the last half somewhat of a slog and I genuinely considered not finishing.

It’s a fun debut and one I will be keenly watching for the sequels thanks to the author’s vivid world building skills, but overall it all fell just short of the greatness it promised early on.

Descriptions of the world are vivid and tangible and you can often feel and smell this dark, dank world. There’s a real sense of revulsion and claustrophobia from Gibson’s writing that helps identify with Hoffman’s phobias. It did get a little repetitive after a while reading the same descriptions of fungal structures after a while though.

The biggest letdown though is the story itself. A strong start descends into predictability, cliche and few surprises given the originality of the world. Some moments of shocking body horror, abuse and superb character development in Hoffman are just enough to offset it, but it made reading the last half somewhat of a slog and I genuinely considered not finishing.

It’s a decent debut and one I will keenly be watching for the sequels, but it fell just short of the greatness it promised early on ( )