Defekt
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4.3 • 12 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the British Fantasy Award!
Nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award!
Find out if five Dereks are better than one in Nino Cipri's Defekt, the sequel to Finna, the surrealist world-hopping adventure.
Derek is LitenVärld's most loyal employee. He lives and breathes the job, from the moment he wakes up in a converted shipping container at the edge of the parking lot to the second he clocks out of work 18 hours later. But after taking his first ever sick day, his manager calls that loyalty into question. An excellent employee like Derek, an employee made to work at LitenVärld, shouldn't need time off.
To test his commitment to the job, Derek is assigned to a special inventory shift, hunting through the store to find defective products. Toy chests with pincers and eye stalks, ambulatory sleeper sofas, killer mutant toilets, that kind of thing. Helping him is the inventory team — four strangers who look and sound almost exactly like him. Are five Dereks better than one?
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cipri returns to the IKEA stand-in LitenVärld (first visited in 2020's Finna) to deliver a delightful middle finger to capitalism and conformity. Otherworldly incursions are a common occurrence at LitenVärld, but as a member of the store's new Special Exempt Employee program, Derek takes the supernatural in stride. He also lives in a shipping container in the parking lot, has no interests outside of LitenVärld, and doesn't understand why people find him unsettling. When he coughs up blood from a new mouth that appears at the base of his throat, he takes his first ever sick day—and the next day, Corporate reassigns him to an overnight shift and tasks him with quelling any sentient furniture that might have popped up through the store's latest wormhole. Then things get weirder: the team Derek's supposed to be working with is entirely composed of alternate versions of himself. As Derek unravels LitenVärld's secrets, he slowly figures out who he is beyond Employee of the Month. Though the story wraps up too quickly, the characters and atmosphere are expertly handled. Fans of Finna and new readers alike will be won over by this empathetic, anti-capitalist romp.
