Writer.
Lisa 2, v1.0 Calamari Archives, December 2024
“Lisa 2, v1.0 is the Yooper retro-tech thriller I didn’t know I needed. Rombes’s creepy af new novel evokes nostalgia and horror in equal measure, and it asks us to confront what makes them so attractive. Though set in the present day, every page brought me back to those halcyon days when we didn’t need A.I. because we had text adventures on the C=64. It also made me a little afraid of the Mac on which I wrote this blurb.” —Andrew Ervin, author of Burning Down George Orwell’s House
“With the paranoia of Philip K. Dick and the artistry of Cassavettes, Lisa 2, v1.0 burrows into you 3D-pipes-screensaver style. Diabolically split into two vantage points, each narrative reads as if it’s not only a palimpsest of the other, a translucent möbius strip, but infected even further by the evil computer in the closet. A brilliant and horrifying techno-drama about the often glitchy line between identity and the things we live among.” —David Kuhnlein, author of Bloodletter and Die Closer to Me
“Resuscitating the relic from 1984, Lisa 1 (as David begins to think of his wife), begins writing her plays on Lisa 2, and David becomes aware of changes in her writing: darker, stranger, more overtly graphic. What most disturbs David: There is a different voice he is hearing, both on the page and in the “reality” of their interactions. It is not Lisa’s voice. Not the voice of his wife, the Lisa that he knows and is intimately acquainted with. She is becoming someone else, with physical, verbal and emotional changes underscoring this transformation, or “possession” as David sees it (Lisa 2 is implicated as demoniacal kin to H.A.L. from 2001). David’s interpretation of the situation opens the splintered gateway to a multi-layered novel which traffics in the mutable lore of memory and perceptual slants. How each one of us curates and caretakes our own reality based on fears, projections, predilections, desires.” —John Biscello, author of No Man’s Brooklyn, full review here