April 2001
Slaying dragons is the easy part... Meet a jaded Gen X'er, a knight in shining armor, a role-playing gamer-freak, a damsel in distress, a loser, and a hero. Her name is Meg Chancellor. Meg is looking for the ESC key to life. Her mother's gone, her father's emotionally catatonic, and her kid sister might be the victim of sexual abuse. Searching desperately for a hero, Meg finds one in the most unlikely place: an online chat room. “Guilliame de la Coeur” is a gallant, strapping young knight in shining armor. He's also a fictional role-playing character Meg's created. And he's about to get Meg into more real-life drama than she ever dreamed was possible. Exploring the powerful ways stories unleash the impulse to reveal our secret selves, User moves back and forth between the sterile cubicles of the modern workplace and the rowdy, anachronistic inns of gamer-usurped online chatrooms. The astonishing visuals likewise oscillate between evocative, fully-painted artwork by Bolton and innovative computer-rendered illustration by Phillips. When Meg's online and real-life existences start to collide, she must decide where her true self really lies. Will she learn what it truly means to be a hero? Part swashbuckling fairy tale and part gender-bending techno-drama, User explores the seductive escapism of the world online, in which the border between fantasy and reality runs razor-thin.
