Gridiron aka The Grid

1995 ~ U.S. edition titled THE GRID

Located in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, the sparkling new Yu Corporation Building is a monument to human genius. It can converse with its occupants. It can forecast the weather. It knows your body temperature, whether you've been drinking or using drugs. It darkens the windows in the noontime glare. It keeps the homeless away at night and lovingly tends the tree that reaches up through its beautiful atrium. Dubbed the 'Gridiron,' the Yu Building is the culmination of art and function. It's also something else: a serial killer.

Something has gone wrong inside the immensely powerful brain of this corporate dream palace. Before the building is opened to the public, one member of a team of brilliant computer programmers dies slumped against his VDT, his eyes burned black. Then a security guard is found with his skull shattered. Now the men and women who know the building best—including its egomaniacal architect and the one person who may actually be able to reason with the computer—know that the building itself is spinning wildly out of control.

Built to survive power outage and the most massive earthquakes, the brain of the Gridiron cannot be unplugged and cannot be outsmarted. For the dozen people who are locked inside, the Gridiron is turning into a living, malevolent dungeon of terrors, where each death is more horrific than the one before, and human survival may be the ultimate achievement...

Notes and News

Excerpted from a November 2010 article in the Independent:

Philip Kerr ... whose book, GRIDIRON, won the Bad Sex [in Fiction in 1995] prize ... felt the joke had worn thin, if it had ever been funny.

“What I remember about the award ceremony most vividly is Germaine Greer reading out various chunks of other people’s novels in a school-girly, sniggering way, with lots of ‘oohs’ and gurning noises being made by the audience. It was like being in a living seaside postcard by McGill. Not long after I won the award, I went on a trip to France and mentioned it to people there and they looked completely nonplussed as if to say ‘only in England’. And there’s a sensationalist factor in the awards. By nominating writers like John Updike and Philip Roth, the modern sacred cows of literature are being put up as Aunt Sally’s," he said.

Critical Praise

"The brainy thriller of the year." ~ Independent

"Compelling... Kerr is way ahead of his literary contemporaries... He may have come closer than anyone to writing the first true multimedia book... England's answer to Michael Crichton." ~ Financial Times

"Ingeniously gruesome... I found myself turning pages in feverish anticipation of the endgame... You will just love it." ~ Times of London

"Powerful... the nail-biting tension gets right down the cuticle." ~ Daily Telegraph

"An exemplary pieces of movie-friendly fiction... as if by Michael Crichton's smarter brother." ~ Literary Review