Book 24 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Comfortably ahead with my reading. My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Some books have an idea so compelling that I end up buying them multiple times, albeit inadvertently! This is what happened with Polybius (2026), by Collin Armstrong, which I recently got at a bookstore because it looked compelling only to realize that I had bought it a couple of months earlier and forgotten about. I decided I had better read it before I ended up buying it a third time.

If you know I was born in 1971 and was a kid through the heyday of 1980s arcade games, you can see why I was compelled. The story centers on a mysterious video game of unknown provenance that finds its way into an unsuspecting community and wreaks havoc.

The book is set in 1982 in a small seaside town in California called Tasker Bay. High school student Andi Wilson is deeply unhappy with life in Tasker Bay and plans to move back to the Silicon Valley area to develop her aptitude for technology. In the meantime, she has avoided making any local friends and is saving money for her eventual relocation by working at the local arcade, working the counter and fixing the videogames when needed.

Andi is uninterested in videogames herself, so she hardly cares when her boss installs a new game in the arcade — Polybius, a haunting exploration of a maze while pursued by a shadowy and sinister figure. The game is much more sophisticated than anything else that anyone has seen, and soon it is the main draw at the arcade and the town, drawing big crowds every night.

But with the arrival of the game also comes an epidemic of violence in the town — animals slaughtered, inexplicable brawls and eventually people murdered. Andi finds herself drawn to the inevitable conclusion that the increasing madness in Tasker Bay is somehow linked to exposure to the game. She teams up with the sheriff’s son Ro to track down the origin of Polybius and what it is doing to people. But as the violence escalates, solving the mystery may become secondary to simply surviving…

There is a fun background to this novel that Polybius is actually an urban legend that appears to have first appeared online in 1998. The novel does not acknowledge the connection, but it is clearly a novelization of the original legend that also featured the game causing horrible psychological side effects in players when played. Armstrong’s novel goes much further, however, in imagining the consequences of the dangerous game. Wikipedia does a nice job of describing how the urban legend probably grew out of several incidents of people falling ill playing games in the 80s combined with general anxiety in that era about the negative influence that the then-new videogames could be having on “the children.”

The name “Polybius” itself refers to an ancient Greek historian who is also famous for constructing a cryptography-friendly cipher, the “Polybius square.” It is not hard to see how he became a natural personality to associate with a videogame with sinister and malevolent code!

The book is genuinely a lot of fun! The main characters are well-developed and their reactions to the unfolding chaos around them feel natural. We learn enough about their lives that I found myself caring about what happens to them.

The book itself oddly felt very much like a 1980s horror novel. I can’t quite explain it, but there was a bit of a trend in 80s horror of this sort where you meet a lot of characters and follow all of them as they meet their gruesome and inevitable fates. An example of this is The Abyss that I’ve blogged about before, where miners actually dig an opening into hell and things go very poorly for all afterwards. So the book is not only set in the 80s with 1980s technology and culture, but it feels very much like a novel of that era (which I mean in a complimentary way).

Polybius is the first novel by Collin Armstrong and I had a great time reading it! I look forward to seeing what he writes next — though I will endeavor to only buy one copy!