The Stowaway
R.E. Dacted
Pseudo Books 2025

F

or half a century, R.E. Dacted has been America’s preeminent novelist of paranoia, the writer who sees patterns and connections where others find only the random detritus of history.  She’s kicking up clouds in the clay-coloured water and pressing further into the unknown with every weighted step.

The Stowaway is classic Dacted fare: totally abstruse, excellently descriptive, and frustratingly digressive. Last time, he delivered a post-apocalyptic epic—at first sight, The Stowaway  looks remarkably like a mass-market thriller, especially plot-wise. Yet, in the end—especially given the choice of celebrity influencers as her chief target—the feeling persists that Dacted’s considerable intellectual and literary firepower is here being used for little more than shooting fish in a barrel.

No characters have an explicitly identified ethnicity, which doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t diverse, but does not provide representation either.

Improbable, unconvincing and lazy—this latest from Dacted is unforgivable. The characterisation is scant and the writing poor, and he never gives peace a chance.

The framing of the question is wrong!

Dacted’s’s best work brings to bear a psychiatrist’s grasp of deep, inner drives and a mad scientist’s knack for conceptual experiments that can draw them out into the open.

This is not that: it turns out we’re simply stuck with an author prone to lapses in tact and taste, and a lack of respect for the reader’s time or powers of concentration.

Yet still, there is that magnificence, burning beneath the surface of every word.

But passions, especially literary ones, can eventually become overwhelming, and in The Stowaway, instead of giving her readers judicious measures of his research into society’s paranoias, Dacted fills page after page with seemingly endless lists of divergent historical fantasies.

What could have been an entertaining satire of the way we construct reality feels like a self-indulgent exercise.