Users

Written by Colin Winnette

Narrated by Justin Price

Miles, a lead creative at a midsize virtual reality company known for its "original experiences," has engineered a new product called The Ghost Lover. Wildly popular from the outset, the "game" is simple: a user's simulated life is almost identical to their reality, except they're haunted by the ghost of an ex-lover. However, when a shift in the company's strategic vision puts The Ghost Lover at the center of a platform-wide controversy, Miles becomes the target of user outrage, and starts receiving a series of anonymous death threats. Typed notes sealed in envelopes with no postage or return address, these persistent threats push Miles into a paranoid panic, blurring his own sense of reality, catalyzing the collapse of his career, his marriage, and his relationship with his children.

The once-promising road to success becomes a narrow set of choices for Miles, who, in a last ditch effort to save his job, pitches his masterpiece, a revolutionary device code-named the Egg, which will transform the company.

In a world rife with the unchecked power and ambition of tech, Users investigates-with both humor and creeping dread-how interpersonal experiences and private decisions influence the hasty developments that have the power to permanently alter the landscape of human experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781696611411

Colin Winnette

Colin Winnette is the author of five books, including the SPD-bestseller Coyote (Les Figues) and Haints Stay (Two Dollar Radio). He was the winner of Les Figues Press's 2014 NOS Book Contest, as well as a finalist for Gulf Coast Magazine's Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center's First Book Award. His writing has appeared in Lucky Peach, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, The American Reader, and numerous other publications and anthologies. He worked as a bookseller for most of his adult life, in Texas, New York, Vermont, and California. He lives San Francisco. More information can be found online at www.colinwinnette.net.

Reviews for Users

[Deborah Roy · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It was pretty good. I liked the audiobook I don’t think I would’ve made it through a physical copy of it though. I never felt bored but I did feel a little lost a few times about the point or plot.