Naked Lunch meets Confessions of an Opium Eater in the virtual world: A mesmerizing first-person account.

Whatever you have heard, read, or fantasized about the Internet, the truth is stranger, funnier, more horrifying. Along the invisible pathways of the technonight wanders a strange tribe undetected by the millions of everyday net users. Some cybergypsies are geeks, technoanarchists who swap computer viruses like baseball cards. But most are seemingly ordinary people, bankers, lawyers, police officers, who at night assume strange identities and engage in weird mind-twisting games, getting their thrills from virtual sex, violence, and even cannibalism. Games leak into their real lives, often with disastrous results.

The Cybergypsies is the story of "Bear," an advertising writer with a wife, children, and a rambling house in the English countryside, who's about to sacrifice everything to his addiction. Bear's real and imaginary lives fuse in a series of bizarre (and often hilarious) adventures. Phantasmagoric tragedies are woven into the dark patterns of his life, building to a personal moral crisis. As the net closes in on him, Bear makes one last desperate attempt to save his marriage.

Two centuries ago, Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater exposed the fantastic world of the opium addict. The Cybergypsies does the same for the virtual world of the cyber addict. On a continuum from William Burroughs and William Gibson, Bear's odyssey takes us into an intoxicating world--alternately terrrifying and ridiculous--where reality and imagination are indistinguishable. It is at once technopuzzle, confession, and strikingly original literary debut.