I love books, I love reading and I love reading stuff by new authors. So when I was contacted by author Chris DeBrie and asked if I would like to review SELECTIVE FOCUS, I figured, SURE THING! The book arrived within the week and I took a moment to look it over. The front and back cover are an interesting shade of green and the cover depicts an abstract image that immediately catches the eye. The back cover contains an intriguing short paragraph and the next-to-last page contains these words, "The author, who remembers when Ice Cube had a jheri curl, lives in Roanoke, Virginia." How's that for not giving anything away?

So I turned to the first page and started reading, not really knowing what to expect from this book and this author. What I found was pleasantly surprising-SELECTIVE FOCUS is a book written in a style that I have never seen before. Over the first 30 or 40 pages, I wasn't sure if I was reading a collection of two-or-three-page snippets, all unrelated, or if, somewhere along the line, all of this would start to gel. Soon enough, I found that all of this had started to gel and the story really started to move.

What you get with SELECTIVE FOCUS is a story told in REAL-LIFE SPEED, for lack of a better description, with lots of different voices lending their take on the overall state of society. Set in a future not too far from now, SELECTIVE FOCUS delves into the problems experienced by a whole new 'race' of human beings, people who have been taken (most times against their will or without their knowledge) and Heightened into NuBeings. This is the story of Vory Neville and Ranita Rodgers, Mat Dalton and Jaclyn, Randall Swisher, Zachary and Rosa, of Russell and Cassie and Andrea, of a mysterious man named English and his enforcer Reggie, of Stef and Grav and their boss, Freddie Clay, of a reporter named Lat Tyler and his interview with the NuBeing known only as Bosh. A high-speed tale of an organization called The Pursuit and their pledge to track down and eliminate the NuBeings. This is a future world where new despicable dictators seize total control over their peoples in horrifying ways, where four-million Americans were killed by BioWeapons called Smelters in New York City, where a man named Graham Kerr undergoes a scary transformation and where chaos rules almost everywhere.

Although Vory and Mat are the two 'Main' characters of which the book keeps going back to, there are a great many voices who also tell this tale of dying hope, of despair and of running away from the demons surrounding all of us. An interesting take on the society of today, the global condition, and where it just might lead us all if we continue on our current path. I enjoyed this book even more because I am quite familiar with the area of North Carolina in which most of it takes place. I was able to visualize many of the locations due to my familiarity with North Carolina, having lived in Fayetteville for eight years in the 1990's. All of this, taken together with the fact that I just loved this staccato style of story-telling, made this an enjoyable read for me from Page-One right on up to the end. Another thing that appealed to me greatly was DeBrie's use of the language to create imagery, this author has a very good feel for the descriptive.

On the very last page of SELECTIVE FOCUS are the words, "next-Selective Focus: the bean ricochets." I can only hope that this means more of the machine-gun paced world of the NuBeings is on the way from author Chris DeBrie. If you're a reader who is into giving new authors and new styles of writing a chance, pick up a copy of SELECTIVE FOCUS today. This whirlwind sure kept me turning the pages.