The Electric Church is not a very good book and I don't recommend it. I read it because a lot of people say it's an essential cyberpunk story. It's pretty unremarkable except for one thing:

I've never read a book that hated cops as much as this.

Hostile assholes with badges ruled the world, case closed.

Most of the story consists of the hero killing cops, being chased by cops, cops being assholes, and the hero killing more cops. While I sympathize with this aesthetic, it doesn't hold a story together very well.

The titular religious organization appears to be a cult of cyborg slaves bent on converting the world, which they do by killing people, snatching their brain, and reviving them in a robot body -- essentially using the brain as an advanced processor powering the robot. This is a cool concept, especially as it becomes more fleshed -- probably not the right word -- out.

It reads like Jeff Somers, the author, had a couple of cool concepts, but wasn't able to build a whole world around them. We hear that there is a ruling class, and Somers often has interesting commentary about them, but they really don't fit into the story.

For instance:

The only people who could afford to have jobs were rich.

And yet, we never get an idea of how this separate society exists. Because most of what we see in The Electric Church is a bombed out, ruinous cityscape crawling with a desperate populace.

The same goes for the system pigs (how everyone refers to the government enforcement arm) -- these forces are apparently highly trained, very well equipped with high tech weaponry and tooling, and yet we have no idea of where they exist. They just sail into the story to shoot and be shot at. I wanted the world of the Electric Church to feel like of had a little more depth.