Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐.5
Spice: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Audio: 🎧🎧🎧🎧🎧
Neurovance is an MM dark romantic techno-thriller set in the near future, and it is one of those books where the premise gives you an idea of what you're getting into, only for the actual story to take you much further down the rabbit hole.
⚠️ Spoilers ahead. This post discusses some major plot developments, including the ending.
I thought I was getting Eternal Sunshine. I got so much more.
Going into Neurovance, I honestly thought I was getting an MM version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
The premise certainly gives you that impression: a technology capable of erasing memories, allowing people to remove the painful parts of their past and keep only the memories they want.
Except Neurovance doesn't stop there.
The story takes that initial idea and asks what happens when memory manipulation becomes something much bigger — and much more sinister.
What if memories aren't simply erased?
What if they can be modified?
What if you can't know whether what you're remembering actually happened?
What if someone else can enter your mind, change your memories, alter your perception of reality, and effectively change who you are — without your knowledge or consent?
That is where Neurovance really started to get under my skin.
The technology itself is fascinating, but what makes it disturbing is the complete loss of control it represents. Our memories are such an important part of how we understand ourselves and our lives. If someone can manipulate those memories, where does that leave us?
How do you prove that something happened when the only evidence you have is your own mind?
And what happens when you can't even trust that?
Those questions become increasingly important as the story unfolds.
The Forgotten
The opening immediately puts us in an uncomfortable position.
We follow Milo as he goes about his life while being stalked by the Forgotten. It's unsettling, and there's an underlying sense that something is very, very wrong.
But this is a dark romance, and I'm not going to pretend that a little stalking and violence is enough to stop me from rooting for a couple. 😂
What really changes the way you see those opening chapters is what comes later.
Milo was in love with the Forgotten.
And then, through a series of events, he completely forgot him.
Not just the big things. Not just the relationship itself.
Everything.
All those little moments that make up a relationship. The conversations you barely remember having. The mundane days. The private jokes. The small gestures. The memories that don't seem important until they're all you have left of a person.
Gone.
And from Milo's perspective, there is nothing to mourn because he doesn't even know what he's lost.
That idea broke my heart.
There is something particularly cruel about forgetting someone you once loved so deeply that you don't even realize you're missing them.
And then there's what happens to the people who have been forgotten.
There is no guarantee that their existence matters anymore. No guarantee that anyone will remember them. They can effectively disappear from someone's reality without that person ever knowing that anything is missing.
That's a terrifying consequence of the technology, and one that made the romance much more complicated for me.
Jay and the horror of not knowing what's real
Then we have Jay.
Jay is the other half of the romance, and his experience with memory modification is where the psychological horror of the book really hits.
We get to see some of his demons, but more importantly, we experience the aftermath of what has been done to him.
And I found that genuinely heartbreaking.
Because it's not simply about having your memories changed.
It's about not knowing that they've been changed.
Imagine remembering something and having no way of knowing whether it actually happened.
Imagine needing someone else to confirm your own experiences because you no longer trust your mind.
Imagine knowing that your memories could be lying to you, but having no way of identifying which ones are real.
That kind of uncertainty is terrifying.
Your own brain is supposed to be the one place where you have some degree of control. But what happens when that becomes the least trustworthy thing you have?
Jay's journey through all of this also gives the story a really powerful redemption arc.
His story isn't simply about getting back to Milo. It's about reclaiming himself.
His life.
His memories.
His ability to trust his own mind.
His love.
And ultimately, his happiness.
There is something incredibly satisfying about watching him slowly reclaim those things after having so much taken away from him.
And then there's Sebastian.
Sebastian is probably the character who surprised me the most.
For most of the book, Seb feels like a character on the sidelines.
He's there. He's important. But he doesn't really feel like one of the protagonists. At times, he almost feels like an afterthought.
And then everything clicks into place.
We discover just how much he has been doing behind the scenes to help Jay and Milo.
The planning.
The sacrifices.
The suffering.
The lengths he goes to because Jay is his only friend and he wants him to have the chance to be safe and happy.
And suddenly this character who seemed peripheral becomes absolutely indispensable to the entire story.
Which is exactly why his ending made me so angry.
Sebastian dies by suicide.
And I honestly don't think he needed to.
This is where I struggled with the ending.
I understand what the author was doing. I understand why it makes the conclusion more powerful. I understand that a bittersweet ending can sometimes have more emotional impact than a perfectly happy one.
But Neurovance is a world where memories can be manipulated.
Where people can be fundamentally changed by altering what they remember.
Where someone who appears to have suffered irreparable damage can, through the right circumstances, find their way back to themselves.
And in that world, I found myself asking:
Why couldn't Sebastian be saved too?
I don't think his survival would have diminished Jay and Milo's story.
I don't think it would have made their happiness less meaningful.
And I don't think the book needed to leave us with one more person who couldn't escape the consequences of everything that happened.
Maybe that's just the romance reader in me talking, but I wanted everyone to get their happy ending.
Not just in their memories.
In reality.
I don't need every story to be perfectly happy. Sometimes a bittersweet ending is absolutely the right choice. But in this particular case, Sebastian's death felt less like an inevitable consequence of the story and more like a line drawn specifically to make the ending hurt more.
And yes, it worked.
The last 10% absolutely destroyed me.
I'm still pissed about it.
A story about memory, identity, and control
Ultimately, what stayed with me most about Neurovance wasn't even the romance.
It was the question of what makes us us.
If someone can erase your memories, are you still the same person?
If they can alter them, how much of your identity remains yours?
If you can't distinguish reality from something that has been implanted or modified, does the truth still matter if you can no longer access it?
And perhaps most frighteningly:
What happens when the people around you know your reality has been changed, but you don't?
Those are some pretty heavy questions for a romance novel to tackle, but I think that's what made this story so interesting to me.
The plot is complex, the narrative is non-linear, and the characters themselves are complicated. It isn't necessarily a book you can switch your brain off for. You have to pay attention, and there are moments where you're deliberately left questioning what you're seeing.
But I liked that.
I liked discovering the truth in stages.
I liked that even quieter moments carried a sense of unease because I knew something was coming.
And I liked that the story made me think about the implications of its central technology rather than treating it as nothing more than a cool sci-fi gimmick.
There is also quite a lot of spice — enough that, at times, I did wonder whether every scene was really necessary for the character development or whether some of it was there to keep readers engaged. Some of it definitely adds tension, but eventually I found that it occasionally distracted me from the much more interesting things happening underneath the romance.
Still, Neurovance is a fascinating story.
It's dark, unconventional, emotionally brutal in places, and much more thoughtful than I expected going in.
I started it thinking I was going to read an MM take on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Instead, I got a story about memory, identity, consent, manipulation, trauma, love, and what happens when the person you trust most is your own mind — until it isn't.
And honestly?
I'm still thinking about it.
