Bargain @ $1.99 from Titan Books in Canada & the US (couponable/VIP discount-eligible @ Kobo, prices should otherwise be the same at all the usual retailers)
The Night Mayor by Stoker & BFSA winning British author Kim Newman (
ISFDB,
Wikipedia), his very first published novel from 1989, which appears to be an sfnal murder mystery thriller set in a virtual reality world.
Welcome to the City made from a dream. But this isn’t any dream; it is the dark and haunting nightmare of a killer.
It is the near future and old-fashioned movies, or “flatties”, have been replaced by Dreams, virtual reality scenarios written by professional Dreamers. When infamous criminal Truro Daine escapes imprisonment, he flees into the City, an artificial world of his own creation, where he rules as the all-powerful Night Mayor.
Now, detective Dreamer Tom Tunney and Susan Bishopric, author of romance Dreams, must join forces to track him down. But how do you hunt the Night Mayor in a city populated by a dense crowd of strangely familiar characters, where it’s always two-thirty in the morning, shots never kill and the creator is omnipresent in every drop of falling rain…?
Some other $1.99 sfnal Newman bargains have also been pointed out by ZodWallop at the top of
page 9 in the Horror & Supernatural megathread. I quite liked
Anno Dracula when I read it years ago, though I haven't gotten around to trying the short story collection yet, which I picked up the last time it went on sale.