The Halter by Darby McDevitt

The Halter

by Darby McDevitt

Diversion Books, February 2026

Award-winning video game writer Darby McDevitt has ported his storytelling skills from digital entertainment to the book publishing industry with his debut novel, The Halter. It's a dual narrative science fiction tale set in the not-too-distant future, where surrogate realities (SRs) have become a dominant form of technology. The main narrative follows down-on-his-luck Kennedy Stark, a cyber PI who's been hired to find Delia Walsh, a code slinger lost (or hiding) deep within one of these Matrix-like realms. The secondary narrative, doled out in a series of flashbacks, unveils Delia's backstory and brings readers up to speed on the evolution of coders and SR tech:

The first surreals were pretty basic. Sensory explorations. No narrative, just experience . . . An early SR called Solar Winds was the first blockbuster . . . We soared through interstellar night, jumping between eight planets and their moons. Orbiting the sun in real time. Full-scale replica of the solar system, but we could adjust our size for easy traversal. We started at one to one for contrast, then continued growing. At the one to five hundred scale, we towered above mountains and cities . . . Ten years after their debut, SR theaters started closing down . . . Commercial [SR] consoles took their place. Once we had them in our bedrooms, the mischief began . . . Cracking Hypo surreals wide open and rearranging them to satisfy our own ideas [was] interesting. We made funny stuff at first. Running a wild west surreal but we’re all riding dragons instead of horses. Or a spy thriller and we’re all packing nerf guns . . . Good times.

It wasn’t long before we started thinking bigger. We took an interest in dynamic systems. Physics, weather, biology . . . If the rain fell a little harder, would the hills erode faster? If the ambient temperature was two degrees higher would the rivers jump their banks? . . . The deadly vastness of our understanding, pushing buttons and pulling levers. Changing the force of gravity . . . Tweaking the universal constant. Watching the world fall the fuck apart. Then we’d put it back together.

The power of Gods in the hands of teenagers. What could go wrong?

Though on the surface McDevitt's story is science fiction, its bones are pure noir. The story centers on a missing person mystery and is populated with virtual and actual corrupt politicians, mafia-like criminals, gun-toting thugs, clue hunting excursions, action scenes, voluptuous broads, and plenty of whiskey served up in smoky bars. The prose is sharp and gives off a distinct aroma of 1940 (archaisms like "gams" and "Toots" are frequent). It's littered with snarky metaphors that, although McDevitt can sometimes miss the mark or repeat the same conceit, wonderfully drive home the hardboiled experience, as one can see by these two examples: 

He had a single bristling eyebrow that ran from temple to temple and his five o’clock shadow looked like someone had sandblasted his face with coffee grounds.

Then she pulled out the stool and smoothed her hands down her skirt and backed onto it like a reversing truck, giving me a long full look at her bumpers.

While McDevitt might have been satisfied with simply telling an exciting, intelligent noir tale wrapped in a cyber setting, he goes beyond that with an examination of several themes that tend to provoke thought and give the story a greater sense of heft. AI is front and center here, and McDevitt dives into its use and whether or not it can or should replace human artistry. He ponders the addictive nature of technology and what it's capable of doing to individuals and to society as a whole (social media, anyone?). He tackles issues of environmentalism and the morality of spending resources on extra-planetary expansion over intra-planetary salvation. Most interestingly, McDevitt claims that any technology will eventually be vulgarized by the basest of those among us, pointing to the obvious case of the internet and pornography. He proposes that, despite evolution, most humans are still simians who can't stop flinging their feces into our collective circuitry . . . a point that's hard to argue in these chaotic times.

These relevant themes not only tie the past and future aspects of McDevitt's tale to the present, they also serve as the parts of the story that will most likely connect with readers.

In the end, McDevitt makes two things clear with The Halter. First, the fundamental skills required to write a good story are most definitely transferrable between mediums. Good characters, good plots, good themes function the same, whether they're found in Skyrim, Skyfall, or Beneath a Scarlet Sky. And second, if you're an award winner in one medium, there's a damn good chance you’ll one day become an award winner in another.

Jim Abbiati is a writer, book reviewer, and IT professional living in Mystic, Connecticut. He's the author of Fell's Hollow, The NORTAV Method for Writers, and has an MFA in Creative Writing from National University. Learn more at https://jimabbiati.substack.com/