Throughout the ages people have utilized numerous methods to demonstrate their solidarity, their affiliation with a particular group or organization, or their commitment to following a certain trend. Whether it is by means of tattooing or piercing, style of dress, or by affectation, someone can make their preferences, thoughts and opinions known to others. In the possible future imagined by author Mark Budz, people can make all of these statements with the help of philm, electronic, programmable skin grafted over a person's natural skin which then allows them to assume the appearance of literally anyone or anything they can imagine.
Countless accessories and upgrades allow philm users to complete their looks. Philm can even be applied to buildings and cars, refitting them with various retro styles. Even those in professional lines of work make use of philm to inspire and/or intimidate; professionals like San Francisco homicide detective Kasuo van Dijk, who chooses to make himself look like incomparable Japanese film legend Toshiro Mifune.
As the novel opens, van Dijk arrives late at night at a low-income apartment complex to investigate the death of a young woman made up to look like an actress from 1930s or "40s Hollywood. Unfortunately there is not much to go on. She has no form of identification and van Dijk can find no record of her in any database. To add to the problem, there is no way to know what she really looks like under her philm, which can only be removed by a professional, so proper identification will have to wait until the autopsy. Detective van Dijk realizes that he clearly has a mystery on his hands. He has his team gather and record of as much as possible in the apartment, the hallway and the stairwell so that useful DNA samples or other evidence can be found and arranges for forensics to remove the body.
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles to the south in Santa Cruz, something bizarre is happening. Women are becoming pregnant without having known a man"s touch. They are experiencing virgin conception. And then, just as mysteriously, they are disappearing. And a strange, local cult, the Transcendental Vibrationists, or TVs, seems to know the how and why of these disappearances.
Pelayo Tiutoj has a decidedly personal stake in finding out what the TVs know. His cousin, Marta, has gone missing as well. And only a few weeks before that, Marta's sister Concetta also vanished.
Pelayo himself is a human guinea pig for a local philm corporation. He is compensated for allowing the corporation's designers to field test their latest creations on his body, literally turning him into a walking, talking advertisement. After his most recent visit to receive a new appearance he notices a strange smug or blur on the surface of the electronic skin. He has a friend of his who is an electronics expert run some tests on the mark and they discover that it seems to be another program embedded in the philm, for unknown reasons and purposes. Pelayo now has this odd turn of events to trouble his thoughts as he searches for his cousin.
Back in San Francisco, Detective van Dijk attends the autopsy of the dead girl and is told by the coroner that her philm skin has actually, in places, worked itself into her skin and, below that, her nerves; something which the coroner has never seen before. These seemingly disparate occurrences are actually connected and converge in a remarkable and horrifying twist.
I really enjoyed this book for many reasons. For one, I thought that the story itself was incredibly imaginative and original. And for another, I loved the mysterious and even, at times, creepy atmosphere that overhung the major events of the story as the characters began to see that something bordering on the supernatural is taking place. But most of all, I appreciated and connected with the powerful statement that the author, through the novel, makes about the way in which advertising and the consumer culture are insinuating themselves more and more into our lives. At a nearly subconscious level we are constantly bombarded with the imperative to buy things. Idolon may be a work of speculative fiction, but it draws on what is happening now in our own society.
