The Inner Harbour reads like an aberrant spawn of Wong Kar-Wai's 2046, David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, and João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata's A Última Vez Que Vi Macau. If you're familiar with Volodine’s "post-exotic" oeuvre, you’ll know to expect a distant, post-apocalyptic future—a perpetual endtimes in which nothing truly ends but continues to dissolve into not an eternity but a really long duration. Surprisingly for Volodine, this one is quite clearly dated to just before Macau rejoined the People's Republic of China after centuries as a Portuguese colony. That doesn't mean it lacks his signature "post-exotic" apocalypticism; rather, it manifests as a schizo-paranoid fiction within fiction, spliced with hard-boiled (neon) noir. A marvelous surprise from Volodine.